Python 2 will not be installed by default on Ubuntu 16.04

Ubuntu 16.04

As we get closer to April 21, the date on which it will be officially launched Ubuntu LTS 16.04 (Xenial Xerus), we are learning more and more details about the next version of the operating system developed by Canonical. One of them is an important change that will affect users who have a printer auto-discoverable by the Windows operating system: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS will not arrive with Python 2 installed by default, the inclusion of which has been the subject of debate in recent days by different system developers, with the most widespread intention being to eliminate the already old technology from their next releases.

But not everyone agrees with removing Python 2 from their operating systems and one reason is the difficulty of removing Python 2 packages from the default installation. Also, there are many packages that have not yet been ported to Python 2, so their libraries are still needed to work. The main one of removing these packages from the default installation of GN / Linux distributions is make the ISO image much less heavy.

Some printers will not work without Python 2

Barry Warsaw, Ubuntu developer, opened a debate on the subject and it talks about the problem suffered by some users who need to configure their Windows printers after a default installation using an autodetect function that would not be available due to not using the Python 2 based libraries, but these libraries can be easily installed from the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) default repositories.

A possible solution that Warsaw provides is for users who need it to install the Python 2 packages from some software that needs their dependencies, such as the backup tool. Let dup (Backups in Spanish) that is installed by default in Ubuntu. Another solution is for Ubuntu developers to add an execution check in the package system-config-printer to see what dependencies are required for it to work properly and automatically detect Windows printers.

In any case, there is still more than a month to go before the official launch of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, so they could also add a tool to regain compatibility with this type of printers to install the necessary Python 2 packages. with this problem, we will have to wait for, at most, the April 21 of 2016.


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  1.   Jose Miguel Gil Perez said