VMware Server 2 on Linux Host with Parallel Port Passthrough

Not being too familiar with linux printing, I blindly assumed that as long as the parallel port worked in the Linux host OS, that parallel port passthrough would work just fine. So, I proceeded to add a virtual parallel port to my Windows VM running on VMware Server 2.0.1 under CentOS 5.3.

I soon realized that this wasn’t as easy as it seemed. CentOS printed test pages, etc. just fine from the host using the device /dev/lp0. However, VMware wanted to use the device /dev/parport0 – actually, I really didn’t have an option as it was simply a drop-down menu and not a simply text field to enter whichever device I wanted to specify.
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