Thanks to both Shane and Michael for their replies. Shane, like you, I doubted that rpm would be found in DSL. However, to my surprise, the question in DSL, "whereis rpm", led to the answer, "/usr/bin/rpm". It seems then that it wasn't any absence of rpm which caused the DSL version of alien not to work for me as I'd hoped. Michael, my "real" distribution, if I can put it that way, is Fedora Core 3. Alien's not included in it. I did a search and ultimately found alien-8.21-1.noarch.rpm. When I tested an installation of it, I got on the usual dependency roundabout. The last message I got when I tested an installation of alien plus four additional perl-type rpms was "perl <1:5.8.0 conflicts with perl-base-5.8.8.4.i386". Since the latter file was one of those rpms whose installation I was testing, I took that to be a complaint that the version of perl I already had installed was less than 1:5.8.0. When I checked which version of perl I had installed, I was told it was perl-5.8.5-24.FC3.i386.rpm. At that stage, I threw up my hands, it being all beyond me. As to your kind offer to convert the two rpms for me, one of them is only 93.78 Kbytes in size, but the other is 3.61 Mbytes, a size too large to be passed back and forth by email. In spite of all the above, I don't want to give up trying to get the files converted and installed. It seems a shame if the printer will run in many other distributions, but not in DSL. So if you have (or anyone else has) any further ideas, I'd be very happy to try to apply them. Thanks again, Leslie