Waxing Cerebral

It's great to be able to use a printer that you have defined in your linux host from within virtualised Windows guest OS (where the printer is either connected directly to your box or over a network). This post assumes you've already setup networking between your guest and host.

Firstly in your printer settings on the host, make sure access hasn't been restricted (open access by default on Ubuntu).
Find the name of the printer that you want to access (ie not the Description which is what appears in network browsing)

Then on the virtual windows machine (for XP):
Choose Add Printer
Select network printer
Select Printer on Internet
For the url, use:

It won't be able to install missing drivers if they're not found (ie can't load the linux drivers into Windows), so find the drivers from somewhere and select the Have Disk option to point Windows at the .inf file.
Should be away laughing!

This howto is has more direct CUPS fiddling than is needed for Ubuntu now, but I got key information from there to find out the above.