One of our volunteers has a Sony Vaio tiny laptop (the type now known as 'netbook'), several years old, given to her by a friend-- but with the hard drive removed (presumably to protect data). She had been using Knoppix, but couldn't get online. So...I set her up with Puppy Linux 430 on a CD + a USB flash drive for saving the pup_save file. Worked great.

One of the terrific things about Puppy is that it has a great record of getting connected to the Internet via modem (even some...

The last time I posted about printing I thought my problems were solved with 2 Puppy boxes telling the Mepis box where the printer was...

But shortly after that, Mepis decided the printer was attached to a Puppy box, and of course couldn't print...again!

So now we have 3 Puppy boxes...and they all know where the printer is, woof!

I've been having fits lately with the printing situation. Installed Mepis 8 on one of the networked computers hoping more media stuff would work...but what happened was that it messed up the...you guessed it: the printing situation! "Suddenly," as tech support so often reports hearing, none of the Mepis computers could find the printer (now shared via a small print server).

I've been getting lessons about computers talking to each other on a network. That idea was,...

Well, turns out I have to "install the printer" to at least one of the Mepis computers each and every morning...or none of them can access it.

But that's better than doing the install wiz on all of them, or so I tell myself. I even whipped up a guide on how to do the install wizard, in case I need to be away from home. How crazy is that?

There must be a better way! If you know it, feel free to tell me!

I took my printing problems to our local GNU/Linux SIG (part of Olympia Microcomputer User Group) a while back. Basically, I had an HP LJ 1300 connected to a WinXP machine and shared on our network. But the WinXP kept losing its connection with the printer...no idea how or why.

So someone at the Linux group had a small print server he said I could try. I set it up, installed the software to the WinXP machine, and voila! All the other computers (mostly Mepis 6.5, one Win98) found...