Wednesday 22 July 2015

Setting up ClearOS as a Google Cloud Print server

I have ClearOs 6 running 24/7 as my main Internet-facing router, providing firewalling and routing for my LAN.

I also have a number of Android devices, and it has always annoyed me that Google Cloud Printing seemed to require a Windows PC switched on.

Some Googling revealed that a Linux CUPS server can be made to share its printers with Google Cloud Print. so I decided to try to set this up.

First, I installed the Advanced Print Server into ClearOs, from its Marketplace (it's free).

Then I set up my printer by following the instructions.

Then I logged on to the server as root, using putty.

I downloaded cloudprint from https://github.com/armooo/cloudprint, and unzipped it to /usr/share/cloudprint.

I installed the packages it needs (mostly worked out by trial and error)

yum install python python-pip gcc python-devel cups-devel

pip install pycups argparse cloudprint[daemon]

pip install --upgrade cloudprint[daemon]

cloudprint

(The square brackets are typed in as shown - they aren't code for an optional argument.)

This gave me a url to put into a web browser to add the printer to my Google Cloud.

In order to have this run automatically, in daemon mode, at startup, I added

cloudprint -d

to /etc/rc.d/rc.local 

That was pretty much it (aside from all the messing about finding out what was needed). Note that I did not do everything in one go, the way I have documented it, just installed each bit I needed when I found out what I had didn't work.

Hope this helps anyone else wanting to do it

Thursday 9 July 2015