Printer works on USB Mint but not on VMware Mint

[pbtn6]

Sorry if this has been covered before but there are so many posts about printers that I did not know how to search for something relevant.

I am completely new to Mint.

Yesterday I installed Mint 21 Cinnamon on a USB stick and everything seemed to work on my Windows 10 laptop except my USB-connected Brother DCP-J785DW printer/scanner when Mint found the printer and installed a driver. Trying to print in Libre Office Writer produced a "could not start printer" error.

Downloading the driver installer tool from Brother's web site and following the installation instructions solved the problem and encouraged me to install Mint in a more permanent way.

Today I installed VMWare on my laptop, downloaded a fresh Mint ISO file and went through the whole process again, this time installing it on the virtual machine. Same problem with the driver that Mint installed, so I again downloaded and installed the Brother driver.

Although the final installation step of printing a test page worked, Libre Office Writer is still reporting "could not start printer". In the Print troubleshooter, when I tried to print a test page it reported "waiting for printer to become available".

Can anyone suggest what steps I should take next?

Peter

[brian_p]

I have never used a VM, so am not much use to you when it is in the picture/

Give a list of printers seen in the Writer dialog. Which one gave the error message?

Without the VM, give

Code: Select all

systemctl status ipp-usb

[Cosmo.]

Does closing all instances of LO and relaunching it help?

[pbtn6]

I have made a small amount of progress since I posted this question.

I tried deleting the Brother printer, ensuring that ipp was installed and then rebooting, and the "cannot start printer" problem was still there. I then removed ipp (because I had read somewhere that it interferes with other print drivers if it is installed) and completely re-installed the Brother driver. The result of these experiments is that Libre Office Writer no longer says that it "cannot start printer" and instead sends a job to the print queue which just sits there and never gets as far as the printer. To me that suggests that the problem might possibly be in the interface between the virtual machine and my printer, rather than in Mint.

I am now looking into the possibility of installing a VMWare Virtual Printer. This is something I have only just read about in the VMWare documentation, which says it "allows you to print from a virtual machine to any printer available to the host machine without having to install additional drivers in the virtual machine". This wouldn't solve a problem in Mint but it might uncover something I had failed to configure properly in VMWare.

If anyone can suggest further steps to get the print queue moving (before I go down a possible rabbit hole with Virtual Printers), that would be very helpful.

Peter

[pbtn6]

I posted a question about this in the printers forum [1] but there were no suggestions as to what may be up.

When I installed Mint on a USB I had no problem printing once I had installed the correct driver from the Brother web site.

When I installed Mint on VMware on my Windows 10 PC, the best I could achieve was to send print jobs to the print queue, but they never get to the printer.

I think I have successfully installed virtual printing on Mint in VMware. At least I can now see all the printing devices in Mint that I can see in Windows, ie my Brother printer, Microsoft Print to PDF, Microsoft XPS Document Printer and Fax, in addition to two Mint printers with similar names to the Brother which I assume relate to Mint drivers. This was an attempt to find a different way of printing. However test pages still just arrive in the print queue and get no further.

I know enough about Mint to have installed it, used the applications and copy-typed commands in a terminal, so please be gentle with me if you have any suggestions.

Peter

[Cosmo.]

I do not use VMW, so only a hot in the dark. If the printer is connected via USB, how is the connection between the virtual machine and other USB devices?

[pbtn6]

I do not use VMW, so only a hot in the dark. If the printer is connected via USB, how is the connection between the virtual machine and other USB devices?

The VMware documentation has nothing to say about how jobs sent for printing in a VM guest environment are transmitted to devices connected to the host machine. I can only tell you what it says about the procedure for connecting a device to the virtual machine (ie. Mint).

"To connect a removable device, select the virtual machine, select Player > Removable Devices, select the device, and select Connect.

If the device is connected to the host system through a USB hub, the virtual machine sees only the USB device, not the hub.

A check mark appears next to the name of the device when the device is connected to the virtual machine and a device icon appears on the virtual machine taskbar."

And after doing this, and selecting the printer displayed in Windows as "Brother DCP-J785DW", an icon does indeed appear in the VM taskbar which displays that printer name when I hover over it. The option when I select the printer is "Connect (disconnect from host)", so it is an either/or thing.

The VMware documentation does say that a Virtual Printer is installed on the guest machine as a virtual CD/DVD drive which I suppose is a folder or file on the host hard drive. I can see that on my Mint desktop with a CD icon next to it.

When I Print from Libre Office (or click on the printer icon in the Mint taskbar) I can see nine 'printers' listed:
Brother_DCP-J785DW_peter_virtual_machine
Brother_DCP-J785DW_Printer_peter_virtual_machine
Brother_DCP-J785DW_Printer:4
DCP-J785DW
DCPJ785DW
DCPJ785DW_peter_virtual_machine
Fax:3
Microsoft_Print_to_PDF:2
Mcrosoft_XPS_Document_Writer:1

The ones with a number at the end are the same devices that I see in Windows, and were not listed in Mint before I installed the VMware Virtual Printer.
DCP-J785DW is (Ithink) the driver I installed from the Brother web site. DCPJ785DW was (I think) discovered by Mint (generic driver?)
I have no idea why there are three "virtual_machine" items in the list, rather than just one.

I have tried printing to all of them except the last three, all of them send a job to the print queue and none of the jobs come out on the printer.

Maybe there is a clue for someone in all this. I am baffled by it.

Petr

[pbtn6]

I have just tried printing from Writer in Mint to the device Microsoft_Print_to_PDF:2 and the document appeared in my Windows Documents folder.

That at least demonstrates that a connection exists between Mint in the VM environment and a printing device in the host environment.

It seems it's just the USB channel that is losing things.

[SMG]

I posted a question about this in the printers forum but there were no suggestions as to what may be up.

Someone asked for information in the other topic that you have not yet provided. What is the reason for creating a new topic?

We have a rule [8] Do Not Cross-Post. If you want a topic moved to a different section, you can click the ! in a post in the topic, select the last option from the drop-down, and request the topic be moved. Please do not create multiple topics on the same issue.

[MikeNovember]

Hi,

With VMware you have two ways to print to a USB printer from a guest:

- disconnect the printer from the host (Windows 10, for you), connect it to the guest (Mint), then print using the printer drivers installed in the guest,

- use VMware virtual printers: in that case, printer should stay connected to the host and the printer drivers installed in the host will be used (this allows to use the printer when no driver is available for the guest OS); of course, the use of virtual printers will NOT work if you disconnect the printer from the host and connect it to the guest.

Regards,

MN

[pbtn6]

Hi,

With VMware you have two ways to print to a USB printer from a guest:

- disconnect the printer from the host (Windows 10, for you), connect it to the guest (Mint), then print using the printer drivers installed in the guest,

- use VMware virtual printers: in that case, printer should stay connected to the host and the printer drivers installed in the host will be used (this allows to use the printer when no driver is available for the guest OS); of course, the use of virtual printers will NOT work if you disconnect the printer from the host and connect it to the guest.

Regards,

MN

Hi Mike,
Thanks for responding.

I am OK with choosing what to connect to. When I turn my USB printer on with Mint running, VMware prompts me to choose whether to connect it to the host or guest and it also shows me the Windows name for the printer. This is helpful because I can find that exact name in Mint's printer list along with a couple of slightly different names that Mint uses for its own drivers for the same printer model.

Just to see what happens, I have connected the printer to the host and then tried printing to every printer that LO Writer lists. I then connected to the guest instead and tried printing to them all again. In both cases I see jobs being sent to the print queue which after a few seconds clear as if they have completed, but nothing comes out on the printer. I had expected to see an error message ("cannot start printer" or similar) if I tried to print to the Windows (host) printer name while the printer is connected to the guest and a similar message if I tried to print to a Mint (guest) printer name while the printer is connected to the host, but this is not the case.

By the way, I still do not undersand why I have three different printers with "virtual_printer" in their name that are available to select when I print from LO Writer. Did I make that happen? It is OK or something to be concerned about? I had assumed that I should ignore them.

Yesterday I stumbled across an option 5 levels down in VMware's menu structure that allowed me to change its USB compatibility from the default USB2 to USB 3.1. I can find nothing about that in the documentation. Now Mint can read a card inserted in the reader. I was astonished that any software needs to be told what generation of USB port is on my PC, rather than detecting it itself. Being able to see a device but not actually communicate with it (and not producing an error message to this effect) seems very similar to my printer problem and makes me wonder if there is a switch somewhere else that I ought to know about.

Peter

[pbtn6]

I have never used a VM, so am not much use to you when it is in the picture/

Give a list of printers seen in the Writer dialog. Which one gave the error message?

Without the VM, give

Code: Select all

systemctl status ipp-usb

Brian,
Just before I saw your reply the error message stopped occurring. See my reply of 2nd Sept to my own post. I think it may be because I had already disabled ipp. I still can't print anything though.

Anyway, thanks for responding.

Peter

[karlchen]

<mod> merged 2 threads about the same problem, [1] / [2], started in 2 different sub-forums. </mod>

[MikeNovember]

By the way, I still do not undersand why I have three different printers with "virtual_printer" in their name that are available to select when I print from LO Writer. Did I make that happen? It is OK or something to be concerned about? I had assumed that I should ignore them.

Hi,

You have virtual printers because you have set this option in your guest properties: launch VMware, select virtual guest, click on "Edit virtual machine settings", then go to "hardware", select "printer"; when "connect at power on" is ticked, you will see in your guest, as virtual printers, the same ones as you see in your host; if you don't want to see virtual printers, just untick "connect at power on" before guest launch (in that case you will see in your Windows 10 only the printers with installed drivers, and you will need to disconnect them from host and connect them to guest to use them).

Regards,

MN

[pbtn6]

By the way, I still do not undersand why I have three different printers with "virtual_printer" in their name that are available to select when I print from LO Writer. Did I make that happen? It is OK or something to be concerned about? I had assumed that I should ignore them.

Hi,

You have virtual printers because you have set this option in your guest properties: launch VMware, select virtual guest, click on "Edit virtual machine settings", then go to "hardware", select "printer"; when "connect at power on" is ticked, you will see in your guest, as virtual printers, the same ones as you see in your host; if you don't want to see virtual printers, just untick "connect at power on" before guest launch (in that case you will see in your Windows 10 only the printers with installed drivers, and you will need to disconnect them from host and connect them to guest to use them).

Regards,

MN

Hi,
My curiousity about three 'printers' with "virtual_machine" in their name was just that - curiosity. It hasn't anything to do with my printing problem, which is that the native printer drivers don't output to my physical USB printer and that the Virtual Printer I experimented with doesn't either.

So, again purely out of curiosity, here is the list of printers that I see when I open the LO Writer File > Print drop-down list:
DCP-J785DW
DCPJ785DW
Brother_DCP-J785DW_Printer:4
Microsoft_Print_to_PDF:2
Mcrosoft_XPS_Document_Writer:1
Fax:3
Brother_DCP-J785DW_peter_virtual_machine
Brother_DCP-J785DW_Printer_peter_virtual_machine
DCPJ785DW_peter_virtual_machine

I recognise the first one - I installed that by downloading it from the Brother web site.
I don't recognise the second one but I suspect Mint may have installed it automatically.
Neither of these printers produces physical output at my printer, regardless of whether it is connected to guest or host.

The next three are the printers on my Windows host and they appeared when I installed the VMware Virtual Printer in my guest.
I have been able to print to Microsoft_Print_to_PDF:2 and create a file on my guest. I have not been able to produce physical output by printing to Brother_DCP-J785DW_Printer:4, regardless of what connection options I experiment with.

The last three are the ones that puzzled me. They too appeared when I installed the VMware Virtual Printer in my guest. They are in the Writer File > Print drop-down list but not in System Settngs > Hardware > Printers. I assume that I should not try to select them as printers. The VMware user documentation says that "When you add a Virtual Printer to the virtual machine, Worstation Player configures a virtual serial port with the virtual machine to communcate with the host printers". Perhaps they are related to that?

As I say, this is just curiousity on my part and I don't think it has anything to do with solving my printing problem.

My plan now is to uninstall Mint and VMware and start again, possibly with VirtualBox or as a last resort a dual boot system. If Mint on a USB stick can be made to print using native drivers I am sure there is a solution somewhere.

Thanks for your input.

Peter

[pbtn6]

Pleased to report that I have now installed Mint in VirtualBox instead of VMware and, with the Brother driver downloaded and installed, I can send output to my USB printer. I do have to explicitly connect the printer every time I start the VM, but that's a minor issue.

On the face of it VirtualBox handles USB devices in the same way as VMware, but one connects properly while, for me at least, the other doesn't.

Peter

[pbtn6]

It turns out that the solution to my problem in both VirtualBox and VMware lay in turning off Auto Power-Off in the Brother printer and also setting its Sleep Mode to the longest available period (off not being an option).

It would be fascinating to learn why this has never been an issue in my Windows host or when running Mint from a USB, but it killed printing with Mint in a VM. I assume it has something to do with how USB passthrough functions. I am sure someone out there could explain it.

Peter