virtualbox.org

Please help to connect a new printer to VB on Win7 Home Premium. Win7 is on a laptop used at work and is already connected to the work printer. I had installed VB (with XP installed in VB) on Win7, but the folks at the office did the connecting of VB to the office printer. Everything works fine there.

At home, the home printer is correctly installed on my laptop, the laptop connects wirelessly to my home network, and my laptop apps print out correctly.

But when I open the VB Settings/Network to add my home printer, I am lost. I see Adapter 1, Attached to: NAT, dropdown menu with alternatives, and Advanced dropdown settings with entries to the office network. I don't know what these items mean, and what and where I might have to enter info to get VB to recognize the new printer.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

First off, let's clarify something. VirtualBox does not use your printer, your guest OS does. So, you'll find nothing in VirtualBox about configuring a printer.

If the guest has a network connection to the host (bridged or host-only) then the guest accesses the printer as a network resource, just as if you had two physical PCs on a network. Just make sure that file and printer sharing is enabled on the PC which owns the printer, and that all PCs are on the correct network. Google for how to access a networked printer from XP.

mpack wrote:Just make sure that file and printer sharing is enabled on the PC which owns the printer, and that all PCs are on the correct network.

The printer doesn't have to be owned by any of the PCs. A lot of modern printers can be connected direct to the router (by wired Ethernet or WiFi). That way you can use any machine to print to it, and no other one needs even to be powered up.

Configuration will be within the printer software. You must install an appropriate printer driver on a virtual machine, just as you would on a physical machine; and you tell it the printer is connected to the network, rather than to USB or anything else. (If you have a printer connected by USB to the host, you can in theory use a USB filter to use it from the guest (you will still need a driver to be installed), but I wouldn't recommend this. It is practically impossible to avoid resource clashes between host and guest if both try to print at once.)

dlharper wrote:The printer doesn't have to be owned by any of the PCs. A lot of modern printers can be connected direct to the router (by wired Ethernet or WiFi).

Strangely enough, I am aware of this.

In that case the printer has a motherboard and network connection inside which performs the same role as an owning PC. I was trying to keep the discussion simple!

mpack wrote: If the guest has a network connection to the host (bridged or host-only) then the guest accesses the printer as a network resource...

Thank you for the info. I'll get to work on it.

dlharper wrote: Configuration will be within the printer software.

Thank you, too, for the info. I'll be looking into it.

In the case of your home printer - if it is already set up as a wireless share then the configuration of the guest should be quite simple: the first thing to try would be bridging to the host's wireless network card, and configuring the guest to be part of the same workgroup as the host: i.e. join the host network. After that you should be able to run ControlPanel | Printers | Add printer | Networked printer and basically just follow the prompts. Bridged networking is sometimes a problem with wireless connections. If it works then you can use this mode for Internet and printing. If Bridged doesn't work then you'll have to go with host-only for printing, with NAT for Internet (I don't think printer sharing will work over NAT, but you can try it).

You probably need to install a printer driver. If you're lucky then the Control Panel wizard will download the correct driver from the Internet, otherwise you need to copy the driver into the VM in some other way, then install.