My goal is to use my Linux box (Fedora Core 6) to store files that I can access on my laptop, and later on my desktop when I get around to buying it. I would need to be able to transfer files from my laptop to my Linux box and ideally be able to open (view, play, modify, whatever) them without having to download them to my laptop. Back when I was in high school the classroom machines could map a network drive to access a folder on a Linux server in the next room and use that to share files. That is my specific goal, but I'm open to alternatives that would provide similar functionality.

Right now my laptop (XP Media Center Edition) is connected wirelessly to a Linksys WRT54G router and my Linux box is connected to it physically.

I've tried to setup SAMBA several different ways (following guides online) and have not been successful yet. I have a folder in my home directory that I've been downloading some stuff to that I've been trying to use as the directory to be shared, but I really don't care what the folder is called or where it is at (I'd bet that using a folder in my home directory is a standards no-no, so if there's a more normalized place to put it, I'd be interested in where that is)

To access files from a windows box on a linux box, you almost certainly want to use samba as this is one of the easiest ways to accomplish the task. Perhaps you should say how far you are getting when trying to access the files from windows? i.e. Are you able to ping the box? Do you get a prompt asking for a user/pass? How is your samba configuration setup (smb.conf)?

My last attempt was to follow the guide here: http://samba.netfirms.com/

My smb.conf looks like this:
If I navigate to Computer > Network > samba > server (as a side note: how does one view the file path of the current directory in Nautilus? Like, /dev/net/) I get a prompt for a username, domain, and password. The username and password that I setup as part of that guide don't seem to work here.

If I try to "Map a network drive" on my laptop using \\[IP address of my Linux box]\server it prompts me for a username and password. If I try the username and password I provided during the guide I get an error here as well: "The mapped network drive could not be created because the following error has occurred: An unexpected network error occurred." (Let's all take a moment to praise the ambiguity of Window's errors).

Edit: If I try to login to fedora as "tenmiles" (the username I selected instead of john in the guide) it says the system administrator has disabled the account.