[ILUG] 3 small problems from a clueless newbie

[Peter Flynn]

Nathaniel writes:

   I have an Hewlett Packard 8390, 

You have my sympathies. I'm afraid I have never had anything but
trouble from HP PCs. Their printers are wonderful: their PCs suck.

   I have been in your archives all afternoon looking for a solution to my
   small problems and have two fire extinguishers and a flame retardant
   suite on just in case. First, my printer daemon wont start (Caldera

Under normal circumstances I'd suggest Red Hat's distribution
if you're just beginning. Caldera's documentation didn't impress.

But given the trouble I've had setting up remote printing I'm
now less certain.

   2.2), I went to Coas and hit the Lpring, but nothing happened, my
   printer (hewlett Packard 895 CSE) starts up and the paper goes up, then
   the red light comes on and blinks, I am now using the 500 HP ink jet
   driver but have tried them all including rawwrite.

I think the 500 driver ought to produce something out of an 895
(although only at 300dpi). Raw won't produce anything meaningful
unless you're using an application like WordPerfect which contains
its own print drivers and can thus send native HP 890 print codes
direct to the printer. Printer lockup like you describe usually means
something is sending data the printer doesn't expect, like commands
intended for a different make. I guess it's possible the 895 CSE
(which I'm not familiar with) uses a different codeset to HP's
`standard' (PCL 1/2/3/4/5/etc)...call HP and ask if they have a
printer driver for Linux.

   Second small problem, my computer crashed while my grand daughter was
   doing her school work in windows and have lost system Commander and it
   wont start up anymore, had to install Caldera again, I reinstalled
   windows but it cant find the operating system now.

Microsoft Windows 95? Norton Commander? Or is this Caldera's X?

   Third small problem is I received an HP 8200 CD writer IDE and no more
   IDE connections (when it rains, it pours), 

Yep. Two per card :-) But you should be able to buy another IDE
controller for about #30 I think.

   if their are one or two out
   their who likes a challenge, believe me, you could not find a better
   one. I am 78 and have 6 months and 9 days computer experience, all
   crashing in windows.

You're doing better than I did...When I started programming I was so
ignorant I tried to use the HP BASIC manual even though I was working
on a DEC-10 (HP BASIC wasn't the same as the PMS/Dartmouth version, it
used square brackets in odd places), so I wrote to HP (on _paper_, no
less, students weren't allowed access to EPSS) asking why some of the
commands didn't work. They were quite polite, all things considered
:-)

   If I have made many mistakes, please forgive, for I don't want to be
   rude or ask too much but my granddaughter needs this computer to do her

Strong the Force is with her  :-)

   work on, neither me, nor her, knows anything about linux (except that we
   want to learn it) but we had hoped to learn it from the different sites
   and not by bothering you fine people. I live in the middle of nowhere
   and it will be 11 days before I can get a repair man on it.

I'm not sure a repair man will help. Maybe someone who has installed
Linux on HP can recommend which distribution to use.

///Peter