Hey there,
if your distribution of linux is recent enough you should be able to use samba almost immediately. If you want to do it through a GUI then activate samba from the redhat or kde menu, it should be buried somewhere within the networking and should be pretty straightforward. If you want to use a command line then man smbmount and have a look at the options. Here's an example.
If I have a win2k machine with a network name SERVER and I want to access the folder Documents on it. Then I first must activate file sharing on the windows machine by right clicking on the folder Documents and allowing file sharing in the options. Then I can (usually) simply execute
smbmount //SERVER/Documents -o username=(windows username)
then press return
I am prompted for a password
password: (windows password)
and I will be able to access that particular folder on the machine.
If you are using a WinXP pro machine you will need to log in as administrator and allow remote access (I believe).
Sometimes (if you are unlucky) you will have to access a file called smb.conf and enter the IP address of the machine you are accessing - and you can get this by typing ipconfig on your windows machine.
This information should be enough to allow you to access files on a remote machine. For more information check out the quickstart documents on
http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/samba/ this is really a quite good introduction to samba and configuring it for your desired network.
Please remember if samba was distributed with your os (ie most likely if you have redhat) that there is no need to download it and configure it for your machine as if you do you will then have to configure it manually and this can be more of a labour than is necessary.
hope this helps
munnki
