GNOME Printer setup tool

[Olivier Tilloy]

On Sun, Apr 30, 2017 at 2:18 AM, Till Kamppeter
<till.kamppeter at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Do you mean that the unity7 entry disappeared from the login options,
or that the default changed to unity8? Either way, that sounds like a
bug, unity8 was never meant to become default or replace unity7
altogether in zesty.


> 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).

Try removing unity8-desktop-session. That did the trick for me.


> 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