[luau] newbie migrating to linux; help with word processors and printing.

[Alvin Murphy]

Aloha:  I am new to this list, although I think I subscribed months ago 
and lost the password. I will try to make this brief, but my experience 
with groups so far seems to suggest one needs to be very explicit to get 
help. I am a psychiatrist, use a laptop every day to create notes, 
trying to migrate to linux by first working out all the problems on a 
box at home (K6-500). I am currently using WPWin9 and occsionally Dragon 
Naturally Speaking v4.  I have successfully installed WP8 for Lin on my 
box at home, managed to transfer files, or actually read and write to 
them via Samba and Gnomba, leaving them on a Windows box at home 
network. I am having the usual hassles trying to print from WP8Lin 
(although printing anything else in Linux is great using Mandrake 8.1 to 
my HP 932c on a Win98 machine.  I finally found a WP8 printer driver 
that works: Apple Laser Writer.  However, I would like to bypass the WP 
driver completely, and do not know how to do that. One of the print 
options in the WP screen (other than hp and disk) is $PRINT, but when I 
try to use that, I get an error message. I am not sure what $PRINT is; 
is it an environment variable?; if so, it is not to be found on my 
environment. Should I try to create it with an export statement? If so, 
how do I point it to the ghostscript spooler and/or filter? If anyone 
can help, would appreciate. The reason for all this, is that when I 
finally take the plunge and install on my laptop, I may have to deal 
with more than one smb network, with various printers; I am fairly 
confident I could set that up with Gnome/Mandrake, but it would be a 
mess to keep trying to find WP drivers that work.

An apology: months ago, I asked for help (much more basic) here and 
someone volunteered and I was supposed to set up a phone meeting. 
Unfortunately, during that time of many reboots and reinstalls, I lost 
the message. Sorry.

Also like the know the when and where of next meeting. Thanks