Hi all,
I have three PCs in my office where recently I have installed Mandrake 9.1 and Red Hat 8.0 respectively.
Now The situation is, in PC X, I have both Windows 98 and mandrake 9.1 .
In PC Y I have RedHat 8.0 . There are three users , who work on these two PCs rotationally. PC X has a cd writer. PC Z has Windows 98 and has a plotter connected.

Now what I want is

1. User A, B, C should be able to share files from X to Y and Y to X and make changes ( all files, not only their respective home directories).

2. Users working on Y should be able to write cds using the cd writer connected to X ( in both cases when X is running Win98 and ManDrake 9.1).

3. All the users of X and Y should be able to print directly to the plotter connected to Z(win98).

I am a novice in Linux , but knows basic networking things.
I will be ever thankful to you for suggesting how I can do these three things.

Thanks very much in advance .

for file sharing look into samba here

http://www.samba.org/

as far as making changes that all depends on file types. i say that because i notice there is a plotter involved which leads me to believe that there may some type of cad files involved. if that is the case, you may have to look into wine here

http://www.winehq.com/

for compatibilty with your windows programs.
if you provide a little more information i.e. what types of files, from win to lin and vice/versa etc.
i may be able to help you more. hope that gets you started.
good luck.

For sharing CD writing if running linux on the writer PC:
http://joerghaeger.de/webCDwriter/

Basically you copy the files to the PC with the writer and then you burn the CD using cdrecord. You can not burn files directly from a network PC (AFIK).
However, I do not know of a similar app for windows. You can use packet writing like DirectCD but not for regular CDs.