Thoughts from wisened pros? Now more than ever I need to migrate to Linux. I am using a dual boot system MS/Linux and I desperately want to cut the cord. Previously the difficulty was an inability to print. Newest guess on that is that there is a possible conflict with lpd and CUPS running at the same time? I have yet to unpack how one goes about fixing that. Most recent challenge was to get a network connection established between two machines on 3Com cards on a 3Com box. Didn't quite get my hands around that, though many different angles were tried. Current thinking on this one is to look around and see if SAMBA might let me configure things. And then I really messed things up. While trying to establish a network I saw this neat option that lets machines share an internet connection, and I pursued it.... After playing around for a while I disabled it and now the Internet connection will not properly execute the ppp. I can manually get all the way through the logon in a Terminal session and when I get to: Entering PPP Session IP address is 216.164.248.83 MTU is 1500 There is nowhere to go from here. Leave it alone and it disconnects. Try to do anything, any key, and gobbledygook shows up killing any prospect of a PPP session completing. Possible that the system "enabling IPv4 packet forwarding" on startup is some leftover from my messing around with sharing an internet connection? No idea on that one. Allright. It is necessary to screw around and make mistakes to learn. I am excelling at that, and probably do now know more. The difficulty is that I have never seen this up and working anywhere before, and when trying to solve a problem I am working without an image in my head of what is or isn't supposed to be there. Thought to reload the Mandrake 7.2 system and hope to wipe the settings I created return to where I was originally pursuing different paths. Trick there is that "Reload" keeps all the settings. Shouldah done a reinstall. Learned that too. Any thoughts, or maybe even just a weak hearted consoling word or two. My deepest and sincerest thanks to the learned who had to endure hear a young fool trying to find his feet. Colin