My daughter has an ibook and she is able to join the workgroup here at our house. I have a linux box with a large public samba share that we use to xfer files between computers... I believe the mac has network gui of some sort that makes it pretty easy to join the network, or at least map a share from another system.
try this
http://guides.macrumors.com/Networki..._with_Mac_OS_X