Ink monitoring Canon i865 with Gutsy

[John Carlyle-Clarke]

I have a Canon i865.  libinklevel 0.7.1 as supplied with gutsy does not 
support my printer, but 0.7.2 does. 

However, I use the Turboprint proprietary driver to run my printer, and 
that can support giving ink levels from the command line. 

In the interest of expanding my knowledge of my system, what methods 
could I use to give myself nice status notification of ink levels?  The 
ideal would be something on the panel that showed Green, Amber (if any 
cartridges are low) or Red (if any are out).

I can see I could write a script in bash or whatever to email me if 
there's a problem and execute it periodically from crontab, but I'd like 
something graphical.  Is there any easy way to roll a custom panel 
applet?  A universal monitor?

I know tools like cronky and gkrellm can be modified to monitor almost 
anything.  I remember from my kde usage that there were superkaramba 
bits that could do that too.

Any suggestions gratefully appreciated.  I'm still very ignorant about 
Debian/Ubuntu packaging too - are there any nice tools which can 
magically make me a .deb from a tarball so that I can just upgrade 
libinklevel and use one of the existing tools?

johncc at liberator:~$ tpconfig --ink
Black          : low
Cyan           : ok
Magenta        : ok
Yellow         : ok
Bright Black   : ok