I recently installed Mandriva Limited Edition 2005 on a old 500mhz machine...
everything is up and running fine on it....I have a home network setup between two XP Pro machines and a Win98, all three of those computers
share one printer...everything works great there as well (ie...sharing files and printer).

My question is how do I join the Mandriva box to this existing network...
I have done about an hour of Google searching and none of the hits are very
clear "to me". Could someone please direct me to some useful resources...links/How To's...thanks for your reply.

I am assuming this is a small network (a workgroup) and you are wanting to use samba (so samba is installed).

To start of you should:

% ping <ip_of_machine_in_network>

just to make sure it is "connected" to the network, no cabling problems or anything.

Next, vim into the samba config file. Im not at home ATM so you might have to search around a little.

% vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

or something like that.

Find a line starting with workgroup and type in the name of your workgroup

workgroup = home

And to setup a share, type in

[home]
path = /home/<username>
read only = no
browseable = yes

write and quit vim and restart the samba server. Again, another guess.

% service smbd restart

If all went well, you should be able to see you Mandriva box in the Windows My Network Places

after reading your reply I booted up my Mandrake and XP machines along with my 98 box and inside each "Network Places(XP)" and "Network Neighborhood(98) was a Mdkgroup already present. I tried to pass along a document from each Win machine to the Mdkgroup but was told that I didnt have the necessary persmissions to do so. What is the next step in granting permissions? Also, I'd
like to be able to print to my Epson printer tied to the 98 machine as I can do from the XP boxes...how do I accomplish this with Mandrake? Thanks for you initial response Please advise.