I was able to get my 2 Linux boxes sharing files. My tower (Fedora Core) has 26 GB of harddrive space that I wanted to make accessible to my 4 GB laptop (Slack). I'm not sure exactly what worked because I probably did a lot of extra work....nmap is a useful utility in seeing what ports are open on the other pc!

I'm using vsftpd on both machines (might be overkill, but I upgraded on both to vsftpd).
Used a bunch of iptable codes to drop a bunch of port (I need to read up on iptables).
Followed the advice of howler in a former thread to get the conf files set up and inetd ready for ftp.
Used Firefox to start an ftp transaction from my laptop. After entering a password from the other pc I was able to see my harddrives in the tower.

Thanx for everybody's help!

My ability to share files seems to only be from my Slack laptop-but that's fine. I found with gftp, I'm able to both upload and download files between my pcs using ftp-and it's fast!