I like my Chromebook, but if I feel like doing something that feels a little like actual work, I prefer to have a flavour of GNU/Linux. Therefore I installed a local chroot using Crouton – which brings me into a world of LXDE, Libreoffice and Firefox.
All of this works pretty well, but sometimes I feel like printing a document in order to do actual proof reading ((Call me old-fashioned, but I am better at that on paper than on the screen.)). This always worked as I have a modern Epson AiO solution that is supported by Google Cloud Print, but I had to change back and forth: Make a pdf, go to Chrome OS, open the PDF, print it. That is not too bad, but it isn’t to convenient. So I tried to install the printer on Linux.
However I wouldn’t get it to work. CUPS worked ((after a # /etc/init.d/cups restart…)), but I couldn’t get the Epson driver to work on this armhf-machine. I tried it more than once, tinkered with it for about three hours, fixed one dependency after another, but it just wouldn’t work.
So, I thought, maybe there is a way to use Google Cloud Print on “standard Linux” and guess what, there is:
Simon Cadman’s CUPS-Cloud-Print.
That worked flawlessly. Just install as follows:
$ git clone git://github.com/simoncadman/CUPS-Cloud-Print.git
$ cd CUPS-Cloud-Print/
$ ./configure
$ sudo make install
Then you just need to set it up:
$ sudo python /usr/local/lib/cloudprint-cups/setupcloudprint.py
All you have to do now is to enter your credentials, copy the link to request the auth code into your browser and copy that code back into the terminal and follow the rest of the process. It is easy, really.
While this may not be the best solution ((Just thinking of privacy concerns here…)) it works for everyone who has a CloudPrint-ready printer that has nasty Linux drivers that are not easy to setup with standard Ubuntu.
Update: Check out the official Wiki entry for printing with chrouton.