Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 139647
print queue gui link is missing from system/menu
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:54 EST
I've spent a good hour or so scanning packages in fc3 to find where the print queue manager went (I believe there used to be a link under the Preferences menu in gnome, although I don't think it was a gnome-specific option). All I can find is the print config, where you set up the printers, but nowhere I can go in and edit/delete print jobs.
The package you're referring to I believe is "printman". Why do you want it? Its functionality has been superseded by several packages: eggcups (desktop-printing) does job monitoring for a user's print jobs gnome-default-printer (desktop-printing) allows you to set your default printer And now every GNOME app uses the new print dialog, which shows you the status of every printer.
I don't care what program I get the functionality from, I just want it back (as it should be, if we are ever to provide a good user experience for non-techie types). Gnome-specific does me no good. Though I use gnome (for now), I use a lot of non-gnome apps. eggcups does nothing when I run it (that I can see). And overall, none of these items are in the menu. I managed to get into the cups manager via the web at localhost:631, but that's unacceptable for an average user. And setting the default printer still doesn't give me access to the queue to see what's printing, and to reorganize/pause/cancel jobs.
The print notification icon (eggcups) should appear in the notification area when you print a document. If you click on it, you can cancel/pause your own jobs. It is targeted for a normal user, not a system administrator. For system administrators, I think using the CUPS UI is not that bad.
That explains it, then. I don't HAVE a notification area. It was only full of useless things like redhat update, which just annoyed me, so I removed it from my panel. Anyway, now I know. Would be nice to have printman back in the mix, though. From a UI perspective, a blank list in an actual program says a lot more than a panel button that only shows up if there IS a list (which indicated to me that there was no way to get at the queue). I'd much rather see an empty list than no list at all.
A lot of other things use the notification area, removing it is definitely not recommended. You can pretty easily just remove the up2date applet; right click and choose exit, then run gnome-session-save. As for the UI - users will see eggcups appear when they print something and should associate it with their print jobs. So I don't see a problem here. What would having printman add exactly?
Just a personal ui preference, I guess. Having SOME way to access the list to make sure that it's empty would be nice (at the time, I was debugging failing print jobs, and didn't know if they were queueing on the linux box or the windows box that was sharing the printer, or if the printer was eating them -- all of which are known to happen at times in this setup). I was mainly just surprised at the disappearance of printman. Anyway, feel free to close the bug if you feel that the panel applet is sufficient.
Well, as a sysadmin you have access to the CUPS logs, etc, which seem like a good way to debug this. Anyways, I think while not having printman might be surprising for people coming from FC2/RHEL3, the new way is better. Thanks for the feedback, please feel free to file any other bugs you find!
*** Bug 137960 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***