I have an Mac OSx machine on which I have virtualbox installed. My most often used virtual client machine runs Windows XP. Almost everything works great, but I was having a lot of issues getting printing to work. I finally got everything figure out though and figured I’d write it up real quick. So here’s what I did.

The first thing I would recommend doing if you have a setup like mine is to find the driver for the printer that you need to print to. Why? Because the apple software that I point you to below will install a driver by default that technically works, but that makes everything you print come out super small. Actually, as I’m writing this is occurs to me that it may be because apple assumes an HP printer, but mine is an Epson.  So maybe the default installed by the program provided by Apple will work “out of the box” for an HP printer… But I would still go ahead and get the correct driver for your printer first.

Then once you have the driver on the client then do the following (found this at virtualbox.org forum and quoted from here):

1) Shutdown the VirtualBox machine
2) Under Mac OS X
a) System Preferences, Print & Fax, Check “Share this printer on the network”
b) System Preferences, Sharing, Check “Printer Sharing” and Check the printer
3) VirtualBox machine, Network:
a) if only one adapter selected and it is attached as NAT [this is the default], then add Second adapter attached as Host-only Adapter, Name: vboxnet0
b) if the adapter is attached as Bridged Adapter, then do nothing (you have a reason to be Bridged?)
4) Start up the Vbox machine – let it adjust to added Network Adapter
a) Download and install from Apple “Bonjour Print Services for Windows” http://support.apple.com/kb/DL999
b) start Bonjour Printer Wizard and follow the menus

That wizard will allow you to print from the client using the printer on the host MacOSx machine. But that wasn’t it for me because Apple defaulted to an HP driver which caused the pages to print all tiny on my Epson. It was an easy fix though. I just had to go back and run the brand specific printer driver install (or manually change the printer driver for the printer added by the apple wizard) so that it would use the brand specific driver instead of the Apple default.

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