here is my issue:
i'm setting up an old machine that will be my printer server. it is being built with redhat 5.2 because i cant boot off of cd, so i needed a distro with a boot floppy. i am also using an old dot matrix printer. my goal is to have the red hat 5.2 computer accept printing from other computers on my network.
is there a good tutorial out there? cuz i dont know what exactly to look for.

system specs for printer server machine:
processor: 200Mhz pentium
ram: 64MB EDO
cd-rom : yes (4x?)
hard drive: 2 GB (but i'm trying to get two more HDD in there, different question tho)
printer: i dont remember the model, i'll update this post when i get home from work.

First of all, I would suggest Slackware 9 instead of Red Hat. It is bloated-feature-free, which helps a lot on an old comp, it uses a floppy boot-disk and the software on it will be a lot more up-to-date than the software on RH 5.2.

The setup-steps depend a lot on the other machines in your network, if they are running windows, you need to set up a samba print share, which is rather different from a normal unix one.

Some resources that might be useful:
linuxprinting.org has lots of information on printers. Check for your printer in the Linux-compatible printer database before you do anythin else.
tldp.org has a bunch of how-to's. Once you've identified what sort of sharing you want to do, look for info in here.

thanx for the slackware idea, and as far as the setup of the other computers on the network, the ones that will be using the printer are all runing linux. in a week or two, i'm gonna be dual booting my main machine, with fedora, and the windows install is ONLY for gaming, so i wont need to print from it, however, my servers will all need to use the printer, for reports, and other general purpose printing.

The cupsd.conf file has this entry:
Allow
Allows access from the named hosts or addresses.

The lp manual for CUPS has this entry:
-h hostname
Specifies the print server hostname. The default is "localhost" or
the value of the CUPS_SERVER environment variable.

so it should be enough to set up CUPS on the print server, add all your clients to cupsd.conf and set the environment variable CUPS_SERVER on each client.

Bear in mind that I have never done this myself since I have a network-aware printer.

thanks again, you've been a HUGE help!
i'll be test thing theory as soon as i get the printer server up and running.

another question:

i was at the slackware site, and i didnt' see any free distro. is there one? i have a lack of funds.. i would gladly pay for linux if i had to, but all my other distros i have, i got for free.. i dont mind dropping $40 on a linux distro, thats not the thing... its just i dont have $40 to spend on an OS right now. Either way, if i have to, i'll use my copy of 5.2 until i can afford slackware. but yeah, i didn't notice a free version on thier site.

http://slackware.com/getslack/ has a list of download mirrors