Cloud Printing from the Google CR-48

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Printing has come a long way!

One of the developments in the Chrome OS operating system is the use of something called "cloud printing."  What this is, basically, is registering your printers with Google's print servers.  It's a great concept; you can register your printer at home, the printers at work, anywhere you can run a chrome browser you can register those printers for cloud printing.
On the CR-48 anything you want to print can then be directed to any of the printers that you have registered with the cloud. So, you're on the road working on a spreadsheet and when you're done you want to print it at work so it's ready for that early meeting, no problem.  When you select a printer from your list of registered printers, you'll also be able to set any of the options on that printer that you would normally be able to set.  Multiple copies, 2-sided, collated, color/b&w, no problem.  You can manage the print jobs by using the option menu and looking "Under the Hood" for the button to "Manage printers...".
At present, only printers connected to Windows machines are configurable from the Chrome options menu, but if you have Linux or MacOS you will have to do a little command line work to make the magic happen.  Here is a link to a blog with information on setting up cloud printing in Linux and MacOSX.   But it's worth the extra effort in the flexibility it provides.  On Linux systems there is also a PDF printer driver, so you could conceivably select that as the print device and actually create a PDF file on your linux machine's local file system.  Very sweet.
Have any questions about printing in the cloud?  Let me know.  It's worth you time to get it configured and working for you.

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