I have installed mandrake 9.1 on my pc and it automaticaly picked up the network cards on my pc and the second pc which is running xp pro. the linux machine shares the internet connection with the xp pro machine. the xp pro machine has the adsl modem connected to it directly. i am looking to access the files on the xp machine via the network and i need to use the printer thats connected to the xp machine to print stuff from the linux machine.
i am a newbie and think i need something like samba installed to set up the network properly ? still finding my way round linux so keeping it as simple as poss would be nice guys.

Yes you need samba installed, and configured on Linux. You will also need to configure your windoze XP system.

If you are short on experience with linux, I would suggest you first install Webmin on your linux machine. It comes with most major distros. You connect to it from your web browser.

After you first install webmin, you connect to it as SU. You can create a regualr user. That is not too difficult to do. The nice part ot webmin is it accesses the necessary configuration files, updates them, and helps a noob figure it out more easily. You can also use webmin from any web browser ( on on your XP system ) without touching the linux machine.

Once Samab is installed on Linux, you can configure it through Webmin.

Do some reading first, it will answer a lot of questions, samba is a complex topic. Try this link as a starting point. http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/toc.html That will get you on your way. Hope this helps.

thanks for that cliff, i will give it a try