schussat

Google suggests that both the 3Com and the D-Link cards are fairly old (making working drivers likely), so your best bet for auto-detection is probably the PCI 3Com. The D-Link looks like it uses the ne2000 driver, which I'm successfully using in an old PC at work -- so, your odds with one of those two are probably pretty good.

Well, in that case, I'm stumped. We have officially exhausted my knowledge of printing. Maybe monkeying with the driver or trying CUPS?

Sorry, that was an aborted sentence. I think I was about to suggest something related to the print dialogs of other applications, like Acrobat Reader. Chances are those send all the proper options to the printer, which is why a PDF, for instance, seems to print normally. But what happens if you print a PDF from the command line, using lpr? If you get the same funny offset, it's almost certainly a problem with the paper size setting. Hrrrm. I don't know that much about the ins and outs of lpr; that suggestion was just the result of some googling. It's possible that the printer driver is incorrectly set, disallowing the modification of the paper size. Can you try a generic driver? Maybe install and give CUPS a try?

I'm not sure what lpr's default is -- it likely depends on the printer and driver -- but to specify A4 size, try this: lpr -o media=A4 filename If you're using CUPS, you can also set the paper size in the printer setup. Because

Nothing too particular, just in terms of troubleshooting. Is the "client" PC also running mdk9.1? Same configuration generally? If you print a postscript or pdf file using lpr, do you get the same off-kilter result? Is it possible that lpr is using the wrong paper settings? (ie, you're printing on A4 paper with the letter setting) That's all I've got off the top of my head.

It has been quite a while since I used my Zip drive, so this is only secondhand: Have you tried the linux tools from Iomega?

Aha, good point -- I hadn't thought of that, as it's been quite a while since I used it last. If it gets updated, I'd say it's definitely worth a look.

I use evolution now on my home desktop, but that's primarily because I got a palm pilot and wanted some integrated calendaring, etc. Previously, I used and really liked Pronto. I'd give it a look.

There are a couple of additional options you can try: Using CUPS, you can increase the print density or lower the gamma value. On my printer, print is fairly light; raising print density to 1.75 seems to do the trick.

It sounds like maybe the windows partition isn't actually mounted. Without yet looking at your /etc/fstab, you might try opening up a terminal and doing: mount /mnt/windows If that gives you an error about permissions, you may need to try this as root, depending on the settings in fstab. After mounting the partition, try viewing it again in Konqueror. If that doesn't work, post to us the contents of your /etc/fstab file, and we'll go from there.

Thanks to all of you for your replies. Thanks to a payroll glitch (my paycheck yesterday was a whopping $45, which is short, oh, about 40 hours), it will be a few more weeks before I can spring for the wireless router and wireless card for the laptop. So for the time being I'll just put another NIC in the desktop and share the connection with the laptop via ethernet. I've set up that kind of configuration using mandrake at my office, so it should be easy to replicate here at home (using shorewall; any comments on shorewall's security?). Treeg, your comments about smoothwall are sort of intriguing. Is there a way to identify which routers run smoothwall? If I can get my hands on a cheap old PC, I'd be really happy to run smoothwall as a dedicated router, per static's suggestion. The only problem there is that I seem to accumulate hardware pretty rapidly: cable model -> dedicated firewall -> switch -?-> wireless access point. Static, do you have any pointers to information on security of NAT gateway/routers versus a dedicated firewall? I trust you when you say they're not as strong as a true firewall, but on what specific grounds are they inadequate? Thanks again, everybody.

Sorry about the funny link. Try this one, but click to save the link and save it as a PDF. You may need a general reference card of some kind to go along with it (like the reference card provided at the flightgear web site. I assume you've poked around that site and the getting started documentation? Combined with the reference card, the Circuit in Flightgeat tutorial looks good.

I came across a tutorial, but it's not complete. It might have enough info to get you off the ground, however. -Alan

I'm moving from dialup to cable modem in a week or so, and I'm starting to think about my tiny home network: A mdk9.0 desktop PC occasionally connected to a winXP laptop through a crossover cable. The desktop is hooked to a printer shared via SAMBA with the laptop, and I use SAMBA to share some files between the two computers. The desktop is also running sshd to allow occasional cygwin sessions from the laptop; and for syncing large sets of work-related files I use unison to connect from the laptop to the desktop (this connection runs through ssh as well). I don't currently have the desktop sharing its dialup connection; when I infrequently want to get online using the laptop, I just plug it in and dial. I'm new to cable, so this is mostly new territory for me. I'd like to connect the cable modem to a wireless router that also has ethernet ports, wire the desktop straight to the router, and connect wirelessly with the laptop -- and I'd like to keep sharing files and the printer, and using unison. So, a few questions: Will this all work? Will it work, but with an extremely high tinker to function ratio? Would anyone recommend (or discourage) a particular router? I appreciate any feedback and suggestions. Thanks- -Alan