I have been working at this for some time now. I'm using fedora core 1 and cups comes installed by default. I've been trying to get this switched to LPRng-3.8.27 but I get a dependency error requesting libcom_err.so.3.

libcom_err.so.3 comes with a package called krb5-libs-1.2.7-10. Fedora uses the newer krb5-libs-1.3.1-6 which uses an older version of libcom_err (libcom_err.so.2.1).

I've tried several different things including making a link to libcom_err.so.2.1 called libcom_err.so.3. and of course, that doesn't work either.

any help would be excellent as I am clueless at this point.

Hi r0b,
how about forcing rpm to accept an older version?? "rpm -i --oldpackage krb5-libs-1.2.7-10.i386.rpm" This should install the rpm without an error saying that there is already a newer version installed.
also, if this does not work and indeed all you need is this single .so file, you can also extract the file from the rpm and drop it into your system (dirty, dirty, dirty hack, but works wonders). The command would be rpm2targz (make a tar.gz archive with all files contained in the rpm. You can easily extract this single file from there). I dont know if that is installed by default though.

Also, are you certain that you are installing a recent version (depending on old libraries seems odd)?
I am sure there are reasons you do not want to use cups. However, if lprng does not work for you, you might want to give cups another chance.

Good luck,
- drowstar