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I've been twisting my brain for nearly a week on a single issue: configuring Samba to authenticate to a M$ "Active Directory Server".

If you are a Samba guru, please see the question I posted at www.linuxquestions.org.

This was a comment that I originally posted to my Why I hate Apple post. But I think it's worth its own post.

I could have a lot of respect for Apple. But I cannot while they greedily feed off of free software (FreeBSD) and charge a killing for their icons and animations and stuff that they throw on top.

Look folks, Apple made a wise decision in going with FreeBSD. FreeBSD is an excellent OS. The only problem with it is that it's not Open Source. So it cannot benefit from the many advantages OSS has. It is good and stable, but it will not be able to keep up with Linux in

History of Linux - This is a nice overview of the Linux movement. It doesn't seem to have been proofread, but the info in it is valuable and interesting still. Enjoy.

I've spent most of the last two days playing games. My favorite Quake2 server was down for a couple days, and I ended up discovering a new game, Unreal Tournament. It's a Quake-like game with spectacular maps and graphics that maintains the integrity of the game play (for the most part). Quake 3 was a disappointment in a way. The gameplay became secondary to the visuals. The weapons are difficult to distinguish from one another and about equally effective (as opposed to the weapons in Quake2, which each behave very differently). There's plenty to look at though. And the kills are spectacular in a cartoonish way.

UT is visually impressive but also very fun to play. Though we'll have to see. Only the demo is available right now. The full release is due sometime in the next few weeks. The demo offers CTF, DeathMatch, Team DeathMatch and something called Bombing Run, which I'd never heard of before. It has network game server search built right in. You can also play against bots which you can set to various skill levels, including 'auto adjusting'. And these are not kiddie bots. You'll have a very tough time defeating bots set to or above 'skilled'.

The one pain, however, is trying to download gaming files. Inevitabley you are directed to either a 404 or FilePlanet, which charges you to download files. You typically have to look long and hard to find the actual files for a game demo. But because I'm such a nice guy, I'll provide you with direct links to these games right here.

Cygwin has got to be the coolest tool that exists for Windows. What is it? From their site:

Cygwin is a UNIX environment, developed by Red Hat, for Windows. It consists of two parts:
- A DLL (cygwin1.dll) which acts as a UNIX emulation layer providing substantial UNIX API functionality.
- A collection of tools, ported from UNIX, which provide UNIX/Linux look and feel.
The Cygwin DLL works with all non-beta, non "release candidate", ix86 versions of Windows since Windows 95, with the exception of Windows CE.