Can my computers talk to each other?
 

I have a laptop installed with Windows XP and a desktop installed with linux. Both machines are hooked up to the router which is connected to my cable modem.

Now, I wish to do the following things:

1. My printers is attached to my linux machine. I would like my
XP machine to see it on the network.

2. I wish to share the files between the two machine.

I know how to do the XP part. How about the linux part? What settings do I need?

You have to setup samba in linux to allow it to share files XP. I don't know about the printers, but I think you can make to Linux machine the print server, and XP can access it as default.

That Samba thing... I don't know how to do it!

Samba can do both (fileshare and network printing). I don't know which distro you're using but you can either go the www.samba.org and download the source and install it or get one of your distro-specific packages and install it that way. If you use debian it's as simple as "apt-get install samba smbfs". Then follow the instructions on samba.org or www.tldp.org to setup. It can be a little tough (especially getting windows to access linux) but a good exercise.