I am a pretty new Linux user and have just installed Slackware 10.2 on an old machine (PII/225MHz/64M). In general the installation was very straightforward, and I am very impressed with the results - I have a perfectly usable K desktop which was certainly not the case with some other distros tried. I do (of course!) have one problem and a couple of questions:

I cannot get CUPS to work at all:

If, as suggested in 'this is how I do it all' on this forum, I try connecting to ...localhost:631, I get the response 'Could not connect to host localhost (port 631). I have also tried the procedures suggested in ...userlocal.com/articles/slackwarecups.php. However, even as root I get as a result of /usr/sbin/lpinfo -v "lpinfo: Unable to connect to server. Connection refused", and much the same for other commands. I assume that I am doing something silly and would greatly appreciate some help in knowing what it is! (Ss I am a new user it won't let me put a full url above)

I have a little foible on network, and specifically internet connections immediately after boot. I can ping an internet domain and the ns will interpret and I succeed. If however I try to connect using either Konqueror or Firefox, I get 'page not found' for several attempts. Then it all starts working and stays that way...

I think I have come to grips with SWareT. Is there a list anywhere of all available packages, or do I have to just try them and see if they are found? Also, will SWareT work with any .tgz package?

Sorry if these questions have obvious answers, but I really am trying to learn!

cups is a service that may not be running. Try checking if the cupsd daemon is running.

There is one gotcha in store yet. Cups doesn't run as root, so if you get a requestor for a username/password from cups, using root and the root password won't work. However you need to be root to save the cups.conf file in the end.
The easiest way is to use the lppasswd command. Add yourself as a user. Then use "kdesu konqueror" and point to "http://localhost:631". When cups asks for authentication, use the username/password you entered with the "lppasswd" program.

First thing I can think of: did you make the start script executable?

Run:
If you get something like the reply then your CUPS did not start because it was disabled.
Manually fix this as root by running:
Eric

Thanks so much guys. Instant and complete success!