Show/manage print queue on small LCD

[Phil Endecott]

Dear Cups Experts,

I'm using a modified Linksys NSLU2 running Debian as a Cups print server.  (If you're not familiar with the NSLU2, it's a tiny, cheap, low-power ARM box with one Ethernet and two USB ports, with at least five community-developed ways to run Linux on it.  There are numerous applications for it from the exciting (robots!) to the mundane (print servers).)

I've just hacked a 4x20-character LCD display module onto mine.  These modules are often seen as fancy status displays on rack-mount systems and the like.  Have a look at http://crystalfontz.com/ for an example.  Some of these displays have a few buttons on them; mine doesn't, but I do have a USB keyboard attached as well.

So what I need now is a way to display and manage the print queue(s) using this display and whatever input method is available.  A quick search on Freshmeat reveals dozens of GUI interfaces to CUPS but the state-of-the-art for character-oriented interfaces seems to be lpq and lprm.

So, does anyone know about something that I've missed?  Is there a curses program that will display the print queue and let you scroll through it, removing or restarting jobs?  If not, can anyone suggest how complex such as thing might be to write, and where I would start (from the CUPS end of it)?  Of course there is a difference between a 25x80 xterm and a 4x20 LCD in terms of what you can fit.  All suggestions welcome.

My next bit of hardware will be a power switch to cut the power the the (USB-connected) printers when they're not in use, and I'll need to work out how to get CUPS to tell my code to turn it on again.  I don't need to worry about that for a few weeks but any suggestions would still be useful.

Thanks in advance for any help.

--Phil.