Thanks everybody for your replies. On the issue of which printers have drivers available for Linux, I may have been the victim of bad or at least obsolete intelligence from
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-PSC_1110
Imagine, questioning a decision based on bad intelligence. Combining their recommendations and my bad experience with Epson, I bought HP. After finding Printdrake, I found all sorts of drivers, but not the exact one for HP psc 2175. Made do with 2170.
Demonstrating the power of Xpdf, drag to select and paste with a click. I copied a single paragraph of one column from Jelly's link.
Page for page, off-brand inks yield
little savings, despite their selling prices
What's more,we found that off-brand ink
have shortcomings that their brand-name
counterparts do not: They are likely to
yield lower-quality color photos and
graphics, and they might clog the nozzle
in the printhead.
That is something to think about. Sometimes you get what you pay for. Sometimes you can find pricing inefficiencies like Super Tech oil filters. For somebody that does a lot of printing, the good stuff would make sense, especially the way printers run out of ink just when you really need to get something printed. On the other hand, if you throw away a cartridge because it dried up before it ran out, maybe the the cheaper ones would make sense. I will mull over this some more.
''This may need to be a new thread, but what distribution are you using and how did you choose it?''
I suppose there is some command that would tell me exactly what I have now. I started with Mandrake 9.2 but upgraded to I think 9.3. I think I copied this from a start up screen some time. Release 2.4.21-013, Mandrake Konqueror 3.1.0 KDE 3.1.0
I am really struggling with Linux. Maybe I am the user the original Macintoshes were meant for. I actually got to where I knew what I was doing with my Quadra and OS 7.6.1. My son was using Mandrake 9.2. My daughter and her husband use Debian. The consensus was dad would be better off with the less geeky Mandrake. The help screens are not ready for prime time. ''To set up a printer, use Printdrake.'' Little details like the 4 steps to ge to Printdrake aren't there. The Mac help screen circled in red each place you needed to click in each step. A blond could manage a Mac. I don't think my kids own a printer, and have not been as much help as I need.
My wife does most of her work on a Power Mac, OS 7.6.1 and a Stylewriter II. I still do stuff with it to. For a sample job like a letter, no frills ClarisWorks is much faster and easier than Open Office. I was surprised how well I did with a little graphics in OO presentation. The Stylewriter is black only, uses a BC 02. If I want color, it is back to the Linux box. With an AMD AK 6 mother board, it is relatively non Wintel.
