Watched The Girl in the Café tonight on BBC1, one of the most compelling pieces of television I've seen in a long long time, and the important message of it was that people in Edinburgh next weekend have the power to change the world.

Continue to put pressure on them to do so!

I own a Lexmark Z35, which I bought because it was described as supporting Linux. For some time I used to use it, using Lexmark's (frankly rubbish) LPD drivers. They sucked, largely because I have a network at home, Amanda my wife has her own PC (currently running SuSE 9.1, 9.3 soon), and I have my laptop, as well as a few servers, and the LPD drivers from Lexmark didn't work in a networked environment, they simply refused to be shared. Moreover, if you wanted to configure the blasted thing, you had to use their own graphical utility, which I guess is great if you're attaching it to a stand-alone desktop PC, but even if I'd been able to get it working across the network, it would have been useless, cos it would have meant installing a bunch of libraries that I simply didn't want on my server. The upshot was that it was attached to Amanda's PC, and once the ink ran out, I never refilled it, and it's gathered dust ever since.

Until today.

Now, I still haven't bought ink for it, but I do now have it working in CUPS and shared on the LAN, here's a quick guide to doing it, cos it ain't as easy as Lexmark would have you believe.

First off, you want to click here. This is Lexmark's SuSE (although, also Red Hat and Mandr[ake/iva]) download page for this printer's drivers. Select the second driver, the once for CUPS, version 2.0-1. Download this into a new directory, and unpack it using tar xvfz filename. This will give you three files, COPYING, README, and a file ending in .gz.sh. Lexmark want you to run sh filename.gz.sh, DON'T! Get sneaky, first remove the first 142 lines from the top of that file using your favourite text editor (first check that 142 lines is right, line 142 should read END_OF_STUB - if it does not, then find that line, and remove the appropriate number of lines). Next, do tar xvfz filename.sh.gz - Don't worry about the error message, so long as two files ending in .rpm are listed.

Now, those two files contain the drivers themselves, so, as root, do rpm -Uvh *.rpm, they should both install fine, and you can get on to configuring it. I personally prefer gnome-cups-manager to configure printers, but then, I would, wouldn't I? You can also use YaST. When you start the printer configuration section of YaST, it should rebuild its database of installed drivers because of the new drivers you just installed, and the printer (assuming it's connected and powered on) should be listed in the detected printers list, you can now configure it, and print a test page. Hint: Z35 Color Jetprinter (yes, the American spelling) should appear in the list of Lexmark models now.

So, you should now have a working Lexmark Z35 printer, enjoy usable printing under Linux.

Oh, one more thing, there's now a little command-line utility (great for server-attached printing) for aligning and cleaning print heads, type /usr/lib/cups/backend/z35 utilities to use it.