i am running red hat 9 and connected to my printer which is on a 98SE machine without any troubles.. heres what i did:
Configured my ethernet adapter (entered its IRQ and I/O settings in network configuration) which i spose you have done already...
i opened printer configuration
(in red hat 9 its in the menu under system settings>printing)
then i clicked "new" to make a new print que
when you get to "select que type" choose "networked Windows (SMB)
then it should find your other machine on the network, expand it and select your printer...
I found one problem with this, your shared printer wont show up if it has any spaces in its share name, mine was shared as 'Epson stylus' and it wouldnt find it until i changed it to "Epson_stylus"
Hope that helps