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.