Printing with mac from vmware problem

[billn]

Hi

I have looked around in the discussions but not found anything specific, sorry if this has been covered a lot before.

I am trying to print with my host mac printer from XP under Fusion 3.0.1. The printers on the mac show up as XP printers, but printing to them does not work. The printer icon comes up in the XP taskbar for 2-3 seconds then disappears.

Probably the issue is that the printers on the mac are actually themselves remote - they are versions of a printer on an airport extreme out on the wlan. But this worked a while back at some point. I have not used XP to print for quite a while.

Running os x 10.6.2.

Any help appreciated, thanks.

Bill

[admin · Accepted solution]

Hi billn,

Here's a knowledge base article for troubleshooting printer issues: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014535

If you aren't able to get printing with that article, I have a few questions.

Are you able to successfully print to these printers using the Mac?

How do you have the printers set up in Windows? Are you using Printer Passthrough, or do you have the printers setup as network printers in the guest?

Eric

[billn]

It works! I think it was just rebooting vmware. It had been "up" for a long time. Thanks!

[admin]

Hi billn,

Glad to hear it!

[gbullman]

For future reference my pass through printers in my virtual machine often don't get refreshed when the VM starts up (with both Fusion and Player on Windows XP). I've created this little command file to cycle the ThinPrint service. Most times that clears up the problem without rebooting anything;

@echo off

echo "Shutting down TP AutoConnect..."

call net stop "TP AutoConnect Service"

pause

echo "Starting TP AutoConnect..."

call net start "TP AutoConnect Service"

pause

I have the pauses in there to give the TP AutoConnect Service plenty of time to fully shut down and to keep the window up after the startup is requested. Most times if I initially had problems running this script in the guest will correct it.

[billn]

This script is helpful thanks.! Ya, there seems to be some sequence of rebooting VM or guest which assures TP is on (or, off); I have not pursued it.

[gbullman]

I have done some amount of investigating, even turning ThinPrint logging on for a while. The TP service always seem to start in my case, but probably less than half the time it correctly creates the printers. It is my understanding that every time the TP AutoConnect Service is started it deletes the previously created printers and creates them new. In my case it more often than not leaves the old printers in place (which are different on the Windows / Player host and the Mac / Fusion host). I have a shortcut to that script in my Quick Launch Toolbar and just run it when I notice the guest printers are not in sync with the host.

Because I typically print through network printers and the VPN clients / configurations I use in the guests block access to the local network the pass through printing is a really useful feature for me.

[billn]

Good info - appreciate, thanks.