News

• 14th June 2004: Printbill forum established... thanks to Renegade for hosting and setting it up :-)
• 8th November 2003: It's been a slow couple of months, owing to my new job as a lecturer soaking up most of my available time. However, I just put a new test release up - please thrash it and tell me if it breaks. The plan is to 'outsource' some of the programming work to my Thesis students next year :-)

  The mailing list is also functional again (and has been for a while)...

• 14th July 2003:Mailing list is down... a dead firewall which will be replaced tomorrow, hopefully.

  Work continues on 4.2.1. Now we have a nice printbill_add_printer script, and printbill_configure has been completely re-written. Both now work with CUPS.

• 18th June 2003:4.2.0 has a nasty bug if you're using colour printing... patch to fix is available here. Apply to printbilld:

  cd /path/to/printbilld
  patch -p0 < /path/to/printbilld.diff
  

• 13th June 2003: Documentation fubar - if you want to do smbclient printing, you need to have this in smb.conf, NOT what is in the FAQ/printbillrc(5):

  print command = /usr/bin/lpr -P%p -Z%m %s
  

  4.2.1 is coming along nicely... soon ready for testing...

• 29th May 2003: Small fubar - libintl must be explicitly linked on most non-Linux OSs, including FreeBSD... so to build 4.2.0 on these platforms you need to add a -lintl to LDFLAGS. Thanks to Clemens Oertel for pointing this out :-)
• 28th May 2003: Final release of 4.2.0. Still no translations, French is almost ready - it will go into the next release. I decided to release 4.2.0 because it does fix many bugs in 4.1.2. Also today I put the new web site on-line...
• 28th April 2003: Beta release of 4.2.0 (no translations yet). It's looking very good, all running very smoothly. The Debian package is now considerably better. The CUPS filter still has not yet been extensively tested. When I get around to doing this, and get a French translation, 4.2.0 will be released. Some more content has been added to the web site, including an item-by-item comparison of PrintBill with PyKota.
• 14th April 2003: New alpha release of 4.2.0.
• 12th April 2003: New Printbill web site! Now somewhat less hideously ugly.
• 27th March 2003: 4.1.2 released. First steps towards CUPS support (that doesn't mean CUPS support works or even exists - just that it's now possible to write it without too much pain :-) Download from the usual place. 4.1.1 was released a while ago but not announced here...
• 31st December 2002: 4.1.0 released. See the changelog for details... the main new feature is the ability to bill on pagecount only (the most frequently-requested feature). Many bugs fixed, many other minor features added. Download here.
• 3rd Sepember 2002: Trivial bug found in webpqadmin.pl. If you don't care about printer stats, don't worry. If you do, then you probably want to change line 1011 to read "if (defined $params{'stats_path'}) {". This will go into 4.0.7 (but not enough has changed to warrant bumping the version number at this stage).
• 18th August 2002: 4.0.6 ("You Want Debug? We Got Debug") released. Grab at the usual place. This release adds much more useful debugging information, such as the ability to get a copy of jobs which can't be grokked by gs, and an e-mail of the error message. Also various minor bug fixes. Also changed in the previous release (4.0.5) - added an optional financial transaction log.
• 5th July 2002: 4.0.4 ("Ghostscript Peculiar") released. Download it here. Only one change, but it should help most people experiencing troubles with 4.0.3.
• 1st July 2002: 4.0.3 ("It Works on FreeBSD") released. Download it here. Porting work sponsored by Bunbury Catholic College in Western Australia.
• 23rd June 2002: 4.0.2 ("filters really work this time") released. Download it here.
• 12th April 2002: 4.0.1 ("RPMs at last") released! Major changes, check out the changelog. Download it from here.
• 21st January 2002: 3.1.2 ("Move Along Sir No Bugs Here") released! Download it from here (Debian package also availble at the same location). Fixes the "I can't print non-postscript even if I've specified a filter in printbillrc" bug, works under RedHat, and includes a configuration utility "printbill_configure". Enjoy!
• 4th January 2002: 3.1.1 ("Trust Me I'm An Engineer") released! Download it from here (Debian package also availble at the same location).
• 1st November 2001: 3.1 beta ("It Works For Me") ready for testing! Download it from here or take advantage of the exciting new Debian package.