Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Very nice tool I recently discovered: ink, a small tool using libinklevel, used to query the ink level of your printer (USB or parallel). In my case this is an Epson Stylus DX4200 (which works very nicely and out of the box btw).

Installation:

$ apt-get install ink

Usage:

$ ink -p usb
ink v0.4.1 © 2007 Markus Heinz

EPSON Stylus DX4200

Cyan:                          76%
Magenta:                       76%
Yellow:                        76%
Photoblack:                    72%

Graphical ink level display:

$ apt-get install qink

Another nice tool built upon libinklevel is called qink, which is a QT-based GUI which displays the same information graphically (see screenshot).

A list of printers supported by libinklevel is available.

As mentioned earlier, I wanted to package the KDE videoblog client kitty for Debian. I finally found the time to really do it, and the package has entered Debian unstable a few days ago. The first bug has already been reported (sigh), but I'm working on it.

kitty got even mentioned in Debian Weekly News (w00t!)