[nixgeek]

First of all, are you getting an IP address? In Slackware (not sure which version you're running), usually most configs are done as root through the pkgtool command. In there, there should be an option for configuring the NIC with either a static IP address or DHCP. You can also enable/disable services from pkgtool. If it's not already installed, you can install Netatalk which is an open source implementation of AppleTalk and they can share with one another. You can also install Samba and configure the smb.conf file in /etc/samba.

Remember that Slackware requires you to make the necessary changes to the config files. Slackware tries to adhere to a pure "vanilla" installation of everything it has and is simple in the sense that there aren't any other tools deviating from the way the app developer intended it to be used or configured. It's just straightforward in that sense that it's a pure UNIX-like environment.