I've "inherited" an old Lexmark Z11 and would like to plug it in to my CentOS 4 box as a second printer. I shut down, hooked it up to the parallel port, rebooted, and hwbrowser recognizes it on /dev/lp0, so I ran through setting it up as a queue with printconf-gui. However, printing the test page fails because the renderer "lz11.foomatic" is not found (details below for anyone who wants to read that far).

A quick look at linuxprinting.org leads me to the lz11 project. I've downloaded lz11-V2-1.2 which contains lz11.foomatic, but after reading through the installer shell script I'm not exactly happy about what it's going to do to my rpm-based cups install (clobber files in the foomatic directories and drop a whole lot of utility scripts in /usr/bin, among other things). Any advice on how best to proceed would be appreciated: What's the least disruptive way to do the upgrade?

As an aside, why does printconf-gui allow one to select a printer for which the driver is not installed? (Should lz11.foomatic be available from somewhere else, and I simply haven't installed all the right centos packages?) __________ Here's the rundown of what I've tried so far, starting with the log output when the test print fails:

I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Adding start banner page "none" to job 4. I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Adding end banner page "none" to job 4. I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Job 4 queued on 'Lexmark' by 'root'. I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/pstops (PID 6400) for job 4. I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Started filter /usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip (PID 6401) for job 4. E [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] PID 6401 stopped with status 1! I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to "debug" to find out more. I [04/Feb/2007:20:33:06 -0800] Saving printers.conf...

If I look with "lpq" I find:

Lexmark is not ready Rank Owner Job File(s) Total Size 1st root 4 testprint.ps 15360 bytes

(Jobs 1-3 were previous failed attempts at printing the test page, which I deleted with lprm.)

Any clues as to why "Lexmark is not ready"? "lpstat -a" says:

Lexmark accepting requests since Jan 01 00:00

Obviously that date is a bit wacky. I tried "lpc":

lpc> status Lexmark: printer is on device 'parallel' speed -1 queuing is enabled printing is enabled no entries daemon present

So I rebooted again, and now lpc shows exactly the same but lpq says:

Lexmark is ready no entries

However, printing the test page still fails with exactly the same "stopped with status 1" error. (The printer remains "ready" now, even after the job fails.) So I set LogLevel debug as suggested and this appears to be the relevent part of the output:

D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] renderer command: lz11.foomatic --papersize=letter --color=0 --inksaving=1 --resx=582 --resy=582 D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] renderer return value: 16777215 D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] renderer received signal: 16777215 D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] Process dying with "The renderer command line returned an unrecognized error code 16777215.", exit stat: 1 D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] The renderer command line returned an unrecognized error code 16777215. D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] Closing renderer D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] KID3 exited with status 1 D [04/Feb/2007:21:45:18 -0800] [Job 6] Renderer exit stat: 1