CentOS - Feb 2007 - Recommendations for Lexmark Z11 driver install?

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

On 2/4/07, Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com>
wrote:
> I've "inherited" an old Lexmark Z11 and would like to plug it
in to my
> CentOS 4 box as a second printer.
After some further investigation I've decided that this is a
non-starter; the lz11-V2 installer does some pretty hideous stuff,
like renaming the "gs" binary out of the way and replacing it with a
perl wrapper.  As if I would never use ghostscript for anything else?

So the alternate plan is to print from a vmware windows machine.
Trouble is I want to run vmware as a normal user, not as root, which
means vmware can't open the parallel port.  Is there anything I should
know, possibly something SElinux related, before simply putting the
vmware user into the "lp" group so that it can access the port?