I have 5 computers on my network. Four are windows machines and one is a Ubuntu linux OS. There are two printers attached to the linux machine and I have been unable to access them from the windows machines. I understand there is a program on Linux called Samba that facilitates this process but I have no idea how to proceed. Perhaps samba for idiots is the answer. I've tried naming the linux printers with a single descriptive word and accessing it, using the IP of the linux machine from a windows machine but keep getting a can't find error message.

Samba is probably the best answer for this dilema. There is a lot of good documentation out there for setting up Samba to share printers over the network. Ubuntu might have a graphical configuration utility for Samba, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

A good start would be to install samba by either typing "sudo apt-get install samba" in your console, or using adept and installing the packages that way.

Here is the official "HOWTO" guide for configuring SAMBA
http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/...TO-Collection/