The last few months I have been working hard to get the +Debian/Squeeze based version of Debian Edu/Skolelinux into shape. +This future version will use Kerberos for authentication, and services +are slowly migrated to single sign, getting rid of password questions +one at the time.
+ +It will also feature a roaming workstation profile with local home +directory, for laptops that are only some times on the Skolelinux +network, and for this profile a shortcut is created in Gnome and KDE +to gain access to the users home directory on the file server. This +shortcut uses SMB at the moment, and yesterday I had time to test if +SMB mounting had started working in KDE after we added the cifs-utils +package. I was surprised how well it worked.
+ +Thanks to the recent changes to our samba configuration to get it +to use Kerberos for authentication, there were no question about user +password when mounting the SMB volume. A simple click on the shortcut +in the KDE menu, and a window with the home directory popped +up. :)
+ +One step closer to a single signon solution out of the box in +Debian Edu. We already had PAM, LDAP, IMAP and SMTP in place, and now +also Samba. Next step is Cups and hopefully also NFS.
+ +We had planned a alpha0 release of Debian Edu for today, but thanks +to the autobuilder administrators for some architectures being slow to +sign packages, we are still missing the fixed LTSP package we need for +the release. It was uploaded three days ago with urgency=high, and if +it had entered testing yesterday we would have been able to test it in +time for a alpha0 release today. As the binaries for ia64 and powerpc +still not uploaded to the Debian archive, we need to delay the alpha +release another day.
+ +If you want to help out with implementing Kerberos for Debian Edu, +please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.
+