Horizon view as downloaded doesn't support virtual printing: what alternatives?

[henrylaw]

I am IT manager, developer, chief cook and bottle washer for a small charity which has an IT teaching room with ten hand-me-down Linux machines in it.  We need to fire up VMWare Horizon View to access remote Windows VMs which are used by one of our partners to deliver basic IT courses to the local community.

The publicly-available linux client (at level 3.5.0) connects to the VMs all right, but there are no local printers visible.  After research, I find that the document "Using VMware Horizon View Client for Linux" (January 2014) says "The virtual printing feature is available only with the version of Horizon View Client for Linux that is provided by third-party vendors."  In other words, we can't do virtual printing with the freely-available View client.

All the vendors listed are huge companies whose main business is to provide complete virtualised systems; we have no relationship with any of them, nor any prospect of doing so.  Where can I get one of these full-featured clients?  We could probably find a tiny amount of money for this (tens of pounds/dollars), which isn't going to get the likes of Dell, Apple, etc excited.

Do I have any options?

[sweater]

The actual Linux desktops themselves can always print to a print server without having to rely on client-side mapping of locally-connected printers.

This should be relatively easy and inexpensive to set up for a small office.

[henrylaw]

Not sure I understand what you're saying.  What I need--and what a "vendor" linux client provides, apparently--is the ability for the remote Windows VM to see the same printers that the linux workstation sees.  The "using" document says this: "After a printer is added on the local computer, Horizon Client adds that printer to the list of available printers on the remote desktop".  In other words if the printer in the next room is defined on my linux workstation as "printer01", then the remote Windows machine sees a printer called "printer01" and printing to it comes out on my local printer.

What you seem to be saying is that the linux desktop itself can see the defined printers, which is normal; is that it?  Or have I misunderstood?

[henrylaw · Accepted solution]

I've fixed this, finally. The VMWare manual "Using VMware Horizon Client for Linux" dated March 2016 (currently available at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/horizon-view/horizon-client-linux-document.pdf) has on page 19 a section entitled "Enable the Virtual Printing Feature on a Linux Client", which describes the creation of file ~/.thnuclnt/thnuclnt.conf.  This, together with some environment variables detailed in the same section, enables Linux-defined printers to be seen and used from the remote Windows VM.