Folks,
I have recently installed VMWare under Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy) and then installed WinXP Home into a virtual machine. I have been having a lot of trouble getting USB printers working inside the guest OS on this setup. Googling and searching the forums here and on the Ubuntu support site has not really turned up a cohesive documentation of the process.
So, the question is: is there a clean, step-by-step procedure documented somewhere on how to add a USB printer into a WinXP guest operating system under Linux, using the free-download VMWare server? Obviously, people must be hooking USB printers up to their VMWare servers right and left, and then trying to use them from inside the guest OS installs. This must be documented somewhere, but I'm having a hard time finding it.
As an example of the problem I'm having, I am trying to install a Brother MFC-6800 printer and I run into this chicken-egg problem where the device must be disconnected when you start the installation of the drivers, then at a certain point you need to "plug the device in." I am trying to accomplish this by "unchecking" the printer in the VM -> Removeable Devices -> USB menu before starting the VM, then starting the driver install, then going back and checking the entry in the VM menu when I get to the point in the driver install that it asks to for the printer to be plugged in. But the driver installer never identifies that the printer has been plugged in; I just get a popup out of the WinXP task bar that there is an unrecognized USB device.
thanks,
Jim