The Lexmark Z605 printer and SuSE 9.3 linux, a little HOWTO

Works for: SuSE 9.3, Mandriva 2006

At first I thought this combination had to be impossible after having read some forum threads. But in fact the installation of the Z605 driver (it actually exists!) is quite straightforward, thanks to the Gentoo wiki. This howto should work for most other distro's, I've tested it with Mandriva 2006 and installation was flawless.

Requirements:

- A Lexmark Z605 printer. At first this printer seems to be a real good bargain until you have to replace the cartridges... I already pulled out the color cartridge and have the black cartridge refilled at a refill centre for half the price. And even under Windows this printer is a pain in the ass, installing unwanted services and opening unwanted TCP ports.
- The Lexmark Z600 series driver, available at http://www.downloaddelivery.com/srfilecache/CJLZ600LE-CUPS-1.0-1.TAR.gz
- The rpm2targz utility, available at http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/~tushar/downloads/rpm2targz.tar.bz2
- The Gentoo Lexmark Printers HOWTO, available at http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Lexmark_Printers

There we go...

- Download the rpm2targz utility to your home directory, open a console and unpack it:

bunzip2 rpm2targz.tar.bz2

- Install it as root:

su
cd rpm2targz
./install

- Download the Lexmark Z600 driver in for example a lexmark directory in your home folder.
- cd into your lexmark folder
- su to root and unpack the driver package:

tar -xvzf CJLZ600LE-CUPS-1.0-1.TAR.gz

- Extract the actual driver:

tail -n +143 z600cups-1.0-1.gz.sh > install.tar.gz

- Untar install.tar.gz you just created:

tar -xvzf install.tar.gz

- Convert the RPM's you just created to tarballs:

rpm2targz *.rpm

- Untar the two tarballs:

tar -xvzf z600cups-1.0-1.i386.tar.gz -C /
tar -xvzf z600llpddk-2.0-1.i386.tar.gz -C /

- Run ldconfig:

ldconfig

- cd to the backend directory and try out the printer:

cd /usr/lib/cups/backend 
./z600

- Under SuSE 9.3 the output should be:

direct z600:/dev/usb/lp0 "Lexmark  Lexmark Z600 Series" "Lexmark Printer"

- Open Yast2 and select Hardware/Printer
- SuSE does detect a Lexmark Z600 Series printer automatically, unfortunately it can't do anything with it by default. Select this entry and select Configure. The Queue name should be correct, press Next. select Lexmark in the list of manufacturers and if everything went as planned there should be a Z600 Color Jetprinter entry in the Select model list. Select it and your Z605 should be ready to go!
- Print this howto for future reference ;)

Good luck!

Jeremy

jeremy[at]autostatic[dot]com