I would like to ask, what about printing on Maemo? Is there a way to print pictures or other things straight from the device?

there have been several solutions - generally they need you have your main computer with linux connected to your printer, and data are sent from the tablet to those devices for printing.
Search for "nprint" or for "cups AND penguinbait"

In general, no. Maemo does not include printer drivers, "Print" options in application menus, etc.

That said, if you have a printer that accepts Bluetooth connections, you should be able to send at least photos to it. Some printers may also accept PDF documents that way.

There have also been print servers made that accept plain text files via FTP, though they aren't common.

In the past, the community (specifically Penguinbait and debernardis) have put together printing support packages for Maemo that are based upon desktop Linux printing technologies. However, these add-ons have been huge installs and haven't made it as simple as tapping "Print" in any application. Still, their work has made printing at least more widely possible, and they (or someone else) may continue their work in the Maemo 5 era.

Please see bug #3099, "Network printing support".

Last week I heard that some of the more technically inclined Maemoans were wondering aloud about supporting printing to wireless and Bluetooth printers.

As a middle course, this sounds smart to me — these aren't the rarities of years past and it provides a clear path for users and limited additional requirements on apps (I think; how wrong am I?).

It's time now for these tech Maemoans to speak up and tell us what and how!

Roger S

Or PostScript.

There are apparently some now that even accept files through SFTP.

My lprng port was pretty small though. apt-cache show lprng says 'Installed size: 3284' (kilobytes).

The reason cups gets so big is that it includes all the powerful filters to convert pdf, postscript, pictures etc. to a format printers understand. This is all stuff that is actually not needed on a client (the tablet), it's for the cups server (the actual cups-compatible printer or cups-server computer with printer).

Indeedy. This is the biggest problem, because it's completely out of the hands of us printer packages providers. The applications themselves need to have an option to format and forward content to the printer daemon (be that cups, lprng or something else).

This will happen. It may even be that some of the old existing packages will still work out of the box, not being GUI-oriented applications.

A bit late

While I did port cups it was pretty useless in the default maemo environment as there was no applications that could print. Cups was included with my KDE package which allowed you to print from browser, koffice, pdfviewer, and more while running KDE. It allowed you to print to ANY networked postscript printer. (no other computers needed) Additionally I doubt any my cups stuff would work on maemo5.

now that n900 contains 32 gigs of space, it shouldn't be that problem to install the cups afterall, right?

The browser is gecko-based, so it could probably extended quite easily - provided that sources are available; don't know about that right now (but there's fennec coming).... some webkit browser woulb surely be trivial to implement (with the qt support built-in)

Add to that ghostview and openoffice port, and we're good to go with network printing - right (or even usb printing, if usb-host turned out possible)?

The real question here therefore is probably not whether it's possible (with n900+/maemo), but whether it's worth the effort - when advanced users will print just fine by the mentioned scp-copy+remote-print method, and regular users will be just hape they are able to watch movies and webmail...