While talking with a couple of guys from Canonical, they pointed me in the direction of a tool called Likewise. This utility will allow you to connect an Ubuntu desktop to an Active Directory. It actually works too. It's a client-side application so no servers need to be touched. You just go to the Add/Remove programs, find and install Likewise and away you go. You will need someone with an administrative password on the domain in order to actually add the PC to the domain. Pretty cool though.

He did tell me that you need to make sure that time stays in sync between your desktop and the AD server. Here is what he had to say about that:
----------
You will need to ensure that your laptop is configured to use your ADC as NTP time server. This is controlled by a variable declared in the file /etc/default/ntpdate. You will need to edit the file as root, using your favorite text editor or by invoking GEdit as
root (Alt-F2, type "gksu gedit /etc/default/ntpdate", click Run, provide password).

Specifically, you will need to change the variable NTPSERVERS, so that it look something like:

NTPSERVERS="your.dc.controller"

Where "your.dc.controller" obviously have to replaced by the hostname or IP address of your AD controller. You can test your change by running ntpdate-debian on the command line, such as:

ubuntu@ubuntusrv1:~$ sudo ntpdate-debian
28 Jan 20:19:50 ntpdate[4358]: step time server 192.168.4.221 ...
---------------

I've got everything working now and I'm logged into the domain. In fact, anyone with a domain account can log on to this machine now using their AD credentials. It creates a new home directory for them just like Windows does. Now I have to figure out how to automatically mount specific drives based on my user ID and password.

I've also got to update my Open Source Desktop. I really like Ubuntu better than SUSE. 9.04 will have OpenOffice.org 3.0 or 3.1 so that will be helpful.

Steve