Printer status - ink levels, paper... returned to windows

[Daniel Kasak]

jrlaprad at yahoo.com wrote:
> Hello, I have cups 1.1.23 installed on Suse 10 and a usb inkjet printer on the suse box. I have several windows computers which have network printers printing to the inkjet on the suse box. The printer is set up as a raw printer and the window clients use the inkjet print drivers. They can print great. However the windows boxes never get any status messages back from the printer. Stuff like ink levels, out of paper etc. I have to use a raw printer because there is not an exact linux driver for the printer (canon i960). the address they print to is: http://linux.johnsnet.net:631/printers/i960_Net
> 
> Is there a way to get these messages back to the windows clients?
> 
> btw; this is all new to me, its my first linux box, so I may be missing something basic here - have patients
> Thanks
> 

Not likely. Not at the moment anyway. You can use something like 
escputil to query ink levels under Linux ( for supported printers - 
yours probably isn't supported ). It's possible that in the future, CUPS 
might support using a tool like escputil to poll ink levels, and then 
send this data via IPP to clients ... *if*, of course, IPP supports 
stuff like this to start with - I have no idea whether it does or not.

But anyway, at the moment, no, it's not possible.

Dan