In my opinion 98 is much easier to network than XP. In XP, you only get the wizard for setup, but in 98, you can change all the parameters yourself.
In interfacing 98 with Linux, we had problems connecting until we found an instruction online having to do with 'windows plain text password'. Even though we weren't using a password, and it wasn't asking for one. You should run into this instruction in relation to Samba.
It always was easier to see the files on the Windows machine from Linux than the other way around.
