GNOME Printer setup tool

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

I have switched from Yakkety to Zesty right after the release and this 
replaced my very stable Unity 7 by Unity 8. After the second crash of my 
desktop (required a system reboot) I switched over to GNOME.

To do so I installed "gnome-session", then logged out, clicked on the 
Ubuntu logo near the user name, and selected GNOME and logged in again, 
getting rewarded with a shiny GNOME desktop.

Note that "GNOME with Wayland" does not work for me. I simply get a 
black screen (I have a 2nd-gen Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon, Intel GPU).

I tried the same on my Artful VM (QEMU), but there the LightDM has no 
Ubuntu logo at the user name. How do I switch desktops there?

To start the printer setup tool I have clicked the upper-right of the 
screen to open the each-and-everything menu, then clicked the round 
tools button at the bottom of the menu to get into the System Settings. 
Clicking on "Printers" opened the new GNOME tool inside the System 
Settings Window instead of popping up the beloved system-config-printer 
(to which I have contributed frequently during the last 10 years).

The main screen looks more polished and also show more info about the 
printers, not only icons and names. In addition, model, status, and 
ink/toner level are shown, also a "Restart" button for stopped printers.

What is missing is that the default printer is not marked as such. You 
have to click on the Gear button to see whether "Default Printer" in the 
pop-up menu is checked (Feature request).

On the upper right is an "Add" button to create a new print queue. This 
leads to a pop-up listing all discovered printers. Clicking an entry and 
then "Add" in the upper right corner immediately creates a print queue 
fully automatically, using a default driver and backend. For my HP 
DeskJet Ink Advantage 2540 it uses correctly the "hp" backend from HPLIP 
and also the PPD file from HPLIP. A "Please wait, creating print queue" 
window would be nice here (Feature request).

The automatic driver selector seem at least to make use of my work on 
driver selection optimization, as a scp-dbus-service.py process gets 
started during queue setup. scp-dbus-service.py is a D-Bus service 
providing all the "dirty" work of system-config-printer.

The list of discovered printers contains some strange entries, for 
example a printer named "Series" so something is still wrong here (BUG!).

Wrong driver choices can be corrected once a printer is set up.

On each print queue entry are two buttons, one says "No active jobs" and 
is grayed out. Probably it gets activated when there is at least one job 
and then it would open a job viewer.

The second button has a gear icon and allows to change settings or 
remove the print queue. A pop-up menu shows the options. The first entry 
opens a dialog to set option defaults, looks all OK for me. The second 
allows to change further settings, like name, description, and driver, 
but in contrary to the option dialog it has no top bar (with "X" button) 
nor a "Close" button near the lower right corner. You have to use Enter 
or ESC on the keyboard (BUG!).

The choice for removing a print queue has no "Are you sure?" dialog (BUG!).

Compared to system-config-printer the interface is much simpler, and the 
look of the main window is more polished. Also the main window provides 
more info. A very good feature is that it is made use of the D-Bus 
service of system-config-printer to make driver decisions.

The presentation of discovered printers (when creating a new print 
queue) seems to have some bugs and there is also a bug with the printer 
properties dialog missing title bar and "Close" button. Also "Please 
Wait" and "Are you sure?" dialogs are missing.

This is simply a quick first impressions review. Later I will probably 
post some bug reports.

    till