Betty,

I'm not familiar with Samba, but I know you can accomplish the same thing through SSH. There is a pretty good tutorial for that here, http://linuxowns.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/share-files-between-2-ubuntu-computers/
The steps are pretty straight forward, and SSH is included in most modern linux distributions. The only thing I don't think it mentions explicitly is how to determine your IP. This is most easily done through the terminal.

$ ifconfig

your output will look something like this

--snip--

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 1c:4b:d6:ba:86:dd
                  inet addr:192.168.1.2 Bcast:192.168.1.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
                  inet6 addr: fe80::1e4b:d6ff:feba:86dd/64 Scope:Link
--snip--

The text I bolded is what you're looking for. The numbers may even be the same. If you are using a wired connection then you will likely need the IP from "eth0"

If anything in that guide doesn't work, you should be able to do everything from the terminal. More info on that can be found here http://support.suso.com/supki/SSH_Tutorial_for_Linux or from the man pages for SSH in the terminal ( $ man ssh ). Hope that helps.

Regards,
Sam

On Tue, 2011-03-22 at 15:43 -0700, betty wrote:

i have two linux computers called 'stormy' and 'stormy too'. i want to 
be in one of my offices in the house and access files or send files to 
another office in my house. ie, send from 'stormy' to 'stormy too' .
  they are both on a wired connection to my cox service.
i have installed 'samba'. (but i don't know where it is on the gui)
i think i have to enable file sharing through the 
'admin>preferences>personal file sharing, but when i  go to that the 
screen says "this feature cannot be enabled because the required 
packages are not installed on your system" . well that is all fine and 
good, but it does not tell me what the required packages are.
this is frustrating.

is this something that is over my head?
as usual thank you for your magnificent and useful help; please keep 
basic as possible.
maybe there is an easy tutorial i can follow?, i looked but as expected, 
there is a plethora of sites....