The company I work for has been a Windows only shop for a long time and has recently starting moving towards Linux. We’re growing at fast pace and sustaining our operations remaining a Windows shop will be too expensive. That’s not to say we’re completely ditching MS.

I recently put into service a new server running Ubuntu Server 8.04.1 to host our SVN and continuous build server (Hudson). I was looking for a way to authenticate the server against Active Directory and came across Likewise Open. I was surprised at the simplicity of the whole setup.

1. sudo apt-get install likewise-open
2. sudo domainjoin-cli join yourdomain.com yourADusername
3. sudo update-rc.d likewise-open defaults
4. sudo /etc/init.d/likewise-open start

Just make sure to replace yourdomain.com and yourADusername with your own domain name and active directory username. If you’re using a firewall, which you should be, make sure the required TCP/UDP ports are open.

I still need to figure out how to mount network shares automatically. I’ll keep this post updated with my findings.

If you ever get locked out of your Ubuntu installation as I found myself to be tonight, you can reset your password quite easily using the following steps.

1. Power up your computer.
2. Press ESC at the grub menu.
3. Press e for edit.
4. Highlight the line that begins “Ubuntu, KERNEL ………” and press e.
5. Go to the end of this line, add rw init=/bin/bash and press enter.
6. Press b to boot your system.
7. Your system will boot up to a passwordless root shell.
8. Type in passwd username where username is the username you lost the password for.
9. Set your password.
10. Type in reboot.

That is it! you can now log in using your new password. You can even reset your root password here but cannot login with it at the login screen.

Did you know there are alternate shortcuts to the commonly used cut (ctrl+x), copy (ctrl+c) and paste (ctrl+v) shortcuts?

Action	Shortcut	Alternate Shortcut
Cut	Ctrl+X	Del+Shift
Copy	Ctrl+C	Insert+Ctrl
Paste	Ctrl+V	Insert+Shift

These are kind of confusing so I’m sticking to the Ctrl+ shortcuts. For those who use different keyboard layouts like Dvorák the X, C and V keys are placed far apart and awkward to use. In such cases the alternate shortcuts maybe easier to use.

Pidgin (formerly GAIM) is an open-source multi-protocol IM client which can allow to chat over MSN, Yahoo, AIM and many other protocols. The following settings will allow Pidgin to work with Google Talk.
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