CrossOver Support - Community Forums

Hi,

We would like to use a fiscal printer on a Mac using CrossOver but it would be great to know if there is any chance of it working successfully before we begin our tests because the tests would be pretty time consuming (would require renting a printer from another company, installing a few programs, preparing our own scripts, etc.). Here is how this works on Windows:

1. The printer vendor provides an ActiveX driver for IE (an .exe installer). This allows me to communicate with the printer (two-way) through IE by using new javascript methods provided by the ActiveX. So it's not a traditional printer driver that installs in the system, it works as ActiveX within IE.

2. The printer is connected via USB.

Would this run on Mac with CrossOver? I'm sceptical because I'm not sure if communicating with such a device via USB is within capabilities of CrossOver. We would like to know if our efforts to try this have any chance of success. Thanks.

Michal.

I agree with your skepticism. I very much doubt that that would work. For most things, including printers, CrossOver relies on the host OS (Mac OS X, in this case) to provide access to hardware.

In theory, CrossOver could route the USB communication attempted by the ActiveX driver through Mac OS X's USB APIs, but in practice this is largely unimplemented. It's on our long-term roadmap.

Since testing would be prohibitively expensive, I recommend you go another route.

Thanks for your reply. We will need to find a different solution then.

Regards.