Printing from a virtual machine in Leopard?

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Thanks - 26 Mar 2008 02:52 GMT

Long time PC user who is seriously thinking of moving to a MAC and
running either Parallel or Fusion for apps available only for PC's.
Asking some questions as they come up.

Found out that some of my printers- including a Canon MP390 are not
supported by MACS. No driver available whatsoever.

If I convert my PC desktop (WinXP Pro) to a virtual machine and run
it, lets say in Fusion, would I be able to print and scan (via USB)
with the MP390 from the VM- even if the printer is otherwise
unsupported in the physical MAC machine?

TIA

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David Empson - 30 Mar 2008 04:34 GMT

> Long time PC user who is seriously thinking of moving to a MAC and
> running either Parallel or Fusion for apps available only for PC's.
> Asking some questions as they come up.

(By the way, the correct abbreviation is "Mac" - short for "Macintosh".
"MAC" is an acronym for "Media Access Control", a networking term.)

> Found out that some of my printers- including a Canon MP390 are not
> supported by MACS. No driver available whatsoever.
[quoted text clipped - 3 lines]
> with the MP390 from the VM- even if the printer is otherwise
> unsupported in the physical MAC machine?

The short answer is "almost certainly yes".

In general terms, the reason for a USB printer not working on a Mac is
due to lack of drivers for Mac OS X. The printer manufacturer has chosen
to not supply a driver, or enough information for someone else to write
one, or the printer is heavily dependent on something major like the
Windows drawing engine.

The Mac will almost always recognise that such a USB device is plugged
in, but won't know what to do with it. For example, it will be visible
in System Profiler as a device connected to the USB bus but the
description will be generic, showing manufacturer and device ID numbers
rather than a meaningful device description.

If you are using a USB peripheral with a virtual machine on Mac OS X,
then the virtual machine can take control over the peripheral. In that
case, the driver is supplied by the operating system running in the
virtual machine, and the lack of a driver on Mac OS doesn't matter. The
Windows driver (in this case) should work fine.

Some USB peripherals completely violate USB standards and might not be
recognised by the Mac at all. In that case, you probably can't use it in
a virtual machine either, because the VM won't know that the device is
connected.

I haven't tried this myself, and only have direct experience with VMware
Fusion - I'm assuming Parallels Desktop has similar handling of USB
peripherals.

Even if you went ahead with this plan, I'd only regard it as a temporary
solution. If you ever want to print anything from a Mac application,
lack of support for the printer on Mac OS X will be a nuisance.

You can do workarounds like printing to PDF, copying them over to the
virtual machine and using Adobe Reader (or similar) on Windows to print
the PDF, but this is a fair amount of hassle.

It would be easier to just buy a new printer which is supported on Mac
OS X.

Signature

David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz

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David Phillip Oster - 31 Mar 2008 08:49 GMT

> Long time PC user who is seriously thinking of moving to a MAC and
> running either Parallel or Fusion for apps available only for PC's.
[quoted text clipped - 7 lines]
> with the MP390 from the VM- even if the printer is otherwise
> unsupported in the physical MAC machine?

1.) I'd be stunned if you couldn't set up the Windows virtual machine to
allow network printing at one TCP/IP address, and send it to from Mac OS
running on the same box at a different TCP/IP address.

2.) The Canon MP390 is supported for scanning on OS X, using Vuescan
from http://www.hamrick.com/

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Mac Forum / General / General / March 2008

Printing from a virtual machine in Leopard?