For the son of friends who live a long way away, I converted an old laptop to run under Damn Small Linux, so that the son would no longer have to use the family computer. The friends have a Lexmark X1150 PrintTrio and they've asked whether I could get that gadget working with the old laptop, at least as a printer. I've found that many people have been able to get that gadget running as a printer under various distributions, including Debian and Ubuntu. In the case of the latter two distributions, people have downloaded a compressed file from Lexmark said by it to be intended for RedHat Linux 9.0, extracted from it two .rpm files, converted those two .rpm files into .deb files using alien and then installed the two .deb files. After that, they've been able to print with CUPS. Using a second old laptop which I also set up to run under DSL, I've been trying to duplicate the process just mentioned, with a view to giving instructions to my friends to follow on the laptop which they have. I've got as far as extracting the two .rpm files, but am stuck at the conversion to .deb stage. DSL has a version of alien available, but I haven't been successful at using it to convert the two .rpm files into .deb files. The persons who've given instructions about this exercise on the Web seem not to have been troubled very much about which version of their own distribution they were using, but simply reported success in installing the .deb files they'd created. If I could get the two .rpm files converted into .deb files via alien by someone running Debian or Ubuntu, is there any prospect that I could then take those files and install them successfully on my DSL computer? Or is it necessary that the conversion take place on the computer on which the files are intended to be installed? If the latter (which is my own guess), does anyone have any suggestion as to how I could proceed otherwise? For instance, would it be possible to convert the .rpm files to source files and then install the source files on the DSL computer? I'd welcome any advice. Thanks, Leslie