For a while now, my mother has owned an online business, and she uses a service called ship station. Shipstation allows an easy way to ship orders. The way we have it set up is a Dymo scale and a Rollo label printer hooked up to a computer that has Shipstation’s software called shipstation connect. Unfortunately, shipstation connect is currently only supported on Windows and Mac. That is a problem because I want to use my old laptop running Linux Mint.
After googling a lot to see if anyone could get it running on Linux and not finding anything, I. looked into using a virtual machine. A virtual machine is basically a computer OS (operating system) that runs inside your native OS or a “virtual computer” that runs inside another computer. I was able to download a software called virtual box by Oracle. The setup was surprisingly easy; all I had to do was download Windows off of Microsoft and create a new VM. After installing windows onto my VM, I downloaded shipstation connect from their website and drivers for the Rollo printer that I was using. After that, I saved a snapshot (a snapshot is basically a save that I can go back to later.) After I exited the program and had to look up how to get my USB devices connected as I didn’t see them show up when in windows, and after some googling, I found out I had to manually add them in the virtual machine settings on the virtual box.
Unfortunately, none of my devices would show. Even after installing the extension pack provided by oracle for USB 2.0 and USB 3.0, it would still show the message <no devices connected> I double-checked that my laptop was detecting the Rollo printer and the Dymo scale by using the lsusb command in the terminal, both devices showed up as connected and functional. So I went back to google, and I found out by this helpful forum answer that I needed to let virtual box see connected devices. After doing a simple command in the terminal, I restarted the laptop, and the virtual box program showed all of the connected devices. Once I got that working, I added the devices I wanted, the Rollo printer and the Dymo scale. And I started the windows machine once again from the saved snapshot. Once windows fully initiated in the VM. I ran the ship station connect program and hooked up the scale and printer. Then I went to my main screen on Linux and opened a browser tab, and tested the scale and printer. They both worked flawlessly and without delay!
Summary:
I was able to run a Virtual machine on a program called a virtual box. And used windows on it. Once I got windows working, I installed ship station connect and basically used the virtual machine of windows as a “local server” to use the scale and print on other devices or use my regular browser on the same device as my virtual machine.