Comment 20 for bug 210738

Dakai Zhu's suggestion above worked for me also, on Ubuntu 9.10. Apparently I have an extra version of python at /usr/local/bin, in addition to the Ubuntu standard version at /usr/bin. I don't know why the /usr/local/bin version is there.

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I was seeing similar symptoms, but not identical. From the desktop menu trying to launch via System->Administration->Printing, an icon appears for a few seconds in the task bar, and then disappears. The printer manager window never comes up. Here was my configuration before I made the change recommended by Dakai Zhu:

$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 9.10 \n \l
$ which system-config-printer
/usr/bin/system-config-printer
$ system-config-printer
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/share/system-config-printer/system-config-printer.py", line 30, in <module>
    from timedops import *
  File "/usr/share/system-config-printer/timedops.py", line 20, in <module>
    import gobject
ImportError: No module named gobject
$ which python
/usr/local/bin/python
$ python --version
Python 2.5.2
$ /usr/bin/python --version
Python 2.6.4
$ head -1 /usr/share/system-config-printer/system-config-printer.py
#!/usr/bin/env python