Ubuntu Desktop Weekly Update: August 25, 2017

GNOME Shell

Didier has written a series of blog posts detailing how we’ve set up the Ubuntu GNOME Shell session in Artful to co-exist with the default GNOME Shell experience and still give us the flexibility we need to shape the experience as we would like. You can start at day one here.  We worked with the Dash to Dock developer to land our Ubuntu branch upstream, read more here.

Video, Audio, Bluetooth & Networking

Captive portal support took a big step forward this week. Our IS team have updated the connectivity checker service to support HTTP (HTTPS is not recommended for reliable detection of portals), a problem we were having with Network Manager not detecting that it was online was tracked down to a bug in curl and a fixed version is being uploaded, and we’re getting ready to upload the necessary config changes to Network Manager to enable the service.
Today we found a handy captive portal near the office.

BlueZ 5.46 was released to Artful.

Printing

QPDF 7.0 and CUPS filters 1.17.0 have just been uploaded to Ubuntu. This brings driverless printing for IPP Everywhere, Apple AirPrint, Mopria and Wifi Direct devices to Ubuntu Artful. Pretty much any printer which allows you to print from your phone should now work as a plug-and-play device via USB or over the network.

Fit & Finish Hackfest

We spent Thursday and Friday this week improving the theming in 17.10. We have made lots of changes to the GNOME Shell theme, the GDM theme and the Ubuntu Gtk themes. Didier has done a quick write up here, with more details coming in the next few weeks.

In The News

• Softpedia cover the call for testing of the new Chromium Snap.
• Linux Unplugged discuss how we’ve implemented our Ubuntu session with GNOME Shell (starts at 49 minutes).
• OMG Ubuntu has an article on the dock.