Traditionally, configuring Ubuntu servers to integrate with Microsoft Active Directory was not a lot of fun.  It wasn’t exactly difficult, but it involved editing lots of PAM and Kerberos configuration files, and often some perilous trial-and-error.  But these days, there’s a better way–for many situations, at least–and it’s called Likewise.  Here’s how it works, and why I think it’s so great.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about five features that make Ubuntu so much more enjoyable to use than certain less-Free operating systems. The comments on that post got me thinking about several other great features that I didn’t mention. So to give those their due, here’s a second list of five things Ubuntu does that I couldn’t live without.

I’ve long heard good things about Ubuntu Tweak, but never used it myself.  With the recent appearance of its 0.5 release, however, I decided to give it a go.  Here’s what I thought.

Last spring, the world changed forever when VirtualBox implemented support for 3D acceleration in Windows and Linux guests.  I have a tendency to be behind the curve on world-changing events, so I didn’t found time to play with this new feature until a few days ago.  But what I found made me really happy.  Read on for the details.

I just finished configuring a Vista laptop for my brother, who needs to run some Windows-only applications for college. Whenever I find myself compelled to deal with proprietary operating systems, I’m reminded why I use Ubuntu. Here’s a short list of some of those reasons.

Although it may not be news to many Ubuntu users, I recently discovered the Disk Usage Analyzer tool, which has proved enormously useful. Here’s why I think it’s so great.

When Lucid Lynx ships in April, it will come with a video editor installed by default, which will be a first for Ubuntu. With this in mind, I decided to test drive OpenShot, an open-source, nonlinear editor that reached its 1.0 release very recently.

I recently tested the open-source video editor OpenShot, so I thought it would only be fair for me also to play around with PiTiVi, the editor that at this point is set to come installed by default with Ubuntu 10.04 when it debuts in April 2010. I found some time to do so today. Read on for the details.

I’ve read a lot about Google’s Chrome browser in the blogosphere, but have yet to see it being used in the wild. Given this observation, and my increasingly strained relationship with Firefox, I decided to give Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, another try.  Here’s what I found.

As regular readers of WorksWithU are aware, I recently purchased a Latitude 2100 netbook from Dell and am pretty happy about it.  Now that I’ve used it for a couple weeks, it’s time for a review of its performance under Ubuntu.