Skip to main content

Frustrating printer bug in the latest Xubuntu 20.04

There is a maddening bug that seems to have crept into Xubuntu 20.04. I've now tested and found this issue on every computer I've installed Xubuntu 20.04 on. The problem occurs when you try changing the printer driver for an existing printer.

Printers > Right Click on the Printer > Properties > Beside Make and Model click Change

At this point the printer user interface freezes up and just sits there infinitely. The printer you're choosing doesn't matter. I've had the same experience with a variety of printers, on a variety of different machines.

system-config-printer frozen

The program responsible for this printer dialog on Xubuntu is called system-config-printer. I filed a bug report several days ago, but it's currently sitting at the bottom of the pile of 75 or so bugs for this program dating back several years.

I seem to remember this wasn't an issue on Xubuntu 18.04, but I'm going to install 18.04 to check and see if the issue also crept into updated versions of 18.04.

This is a pretty major bug to have crept into a long term service release and because it affects such an important service, printing, I'm considering looking at other distributions for our project if it doesn't get resolved soon. We help people from all walks of life, and Linux can be intimidating enough without problems like not being able to re-configure a printer driver.

I'll update this post if I see more movement on the printer front.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

LibreOffice to the rescue (where Microsoft Word fails)

 This morning I fielded an interesting call from staff trying to help someone who dropped in to our centre. The person had forwarded an Apple .pages document to our front desk staff, but they couldn't open the document with Microsoft Word. The person didn't have access to whatever created the .pages document, so they couldn't open it and File > Save As to convert it to a different format. I figured (correctly as it turns out) that LibreOffice might be able to open the .pages document. Sure enough it did, and the staff were able to edit and print the document from LibreOffice, and ultimately save it as a Word document. Oh the irony.
Post a Comment
Read more

VLC displays black screen when playing DVD video under Xubuntu 20.04

This afternoon we were refurbishing an older AMD Phenom II X6-based computer and we ran into an issue that when we put a DVD into the drive VLC would open up and start to play, but we only saw black in the VLC window. The video was definitely playing, but VLC wasn't displaying anything. Video is visible if you disable Hardware Accelerated Decoding in VLC: VLC > Tools > Preferences > Input & Codecs Settings Hardware-accelerated decoding > Disable  We're not sure if this is an issue strictly related to a bug in VLC since when we opened the video with Parole Media player it played just fine (no adjustments needed). In our case this happened with a Radeon 7950HD Twin Frozr 3GB/OC video card. If you have one of these cards, are running some flavour of Ubuntu, and experience this or a similar issue please leave a comment below. We also tested Xonotic using Phoronix Test Suite and it seemed to run pretty quickly. For the curious, the system has the following physical s...
Post a Comment
Read more