how do i get virtualbox to share printers with the machines running xp in the house
 

an admin or mod move this forum if it is in the wrong place

i was getting impatient in finding a way to make some of my peripherial devices to work in linux but no luck, so i installed windows xp home in virtual box, gave it access to my usb devices and installed the drivers for the printers and scanner. but there is just one thing that i want to do now

how do i get windows xp to share my printer in virtual box with other computers in the house

The only aspect of this specific to VirtualBox is that the VM's network adapter must be configured as a "Bridged Adapter". That allows the OS in the VM to configure its adapter with an address on your LAN so other devices on the LAN can use it as a server.

After that the question becomes "how do i get windows xp to share my printer in with other computers in the house?". Which OSes are the other computers in the house running?

windows xp (of course)

also just a little off topic but si there an easy way to transfer files from linux into windows xzp inside virtual box without the internet

So the question has become "how do i get windows xp to share my printer in with other windows xp computers in the house?" which is answered in many places on the Internet.

Yes -- VirtualBox's Shared Folders or Samba running on the Linux host creating a "network shared drive" for the WXP guest.

i do know how to share printers with windows xp machines from a windows xp machine but i perform the process in virtualbox and no dice

do i have to activate windows for this to work because i don't know how to activate windows without the cd key (got rid of all the notifications tellinng me to do so, but i think its only going to last a full month and re-installing all the drivers i put on there take a while)

Please try the same procedure on your XP systems running on real hardware. When you have it working there and the same process does not work when one of the computers is running on Linux+VirtuaBox then ask again here. We can help best when you tell us what you have done and what the error symptoms were.

Those are not questions for this "Linux Networking" forum! There are lots of pages on the Internet relevant to your question that you can find by netsearching.