How do I network these two operating systems? Do I need any special hardware? Software?

Do you mean you want them to talk to each other? Or run a Linux firewall/router with a Windows client? Or some other server on the Linux box with a Windows client?

If you want to share files between the two, you probably want to use Samba. samba.org has documentation online and you could also search around the Debian website (Linspire is Debian-based). Try googling "site:debian.org samba" or "site:samba.org linspire".

To use the Linspire box as a router you want to use iptables; the best documentation I've seen for that is by gentoo. Look for "firewall" on this page: <http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/gentoo-security.xml>.

If you want to use the Linspire box as an LDAP server with Windows clients, I think it's possible (openldap.org, perhaps) but I haven't the foggiest idea how to do it.

HTH,

GR