Ubuntu 10.04, the Lucid Lynx is now released to the wild. There is lots of stuff out there talking about all the cool stuff that is included. I am going to talk about some of the stuff that you probably won’t see in the reviews.
Kerberos
A fairly niche subject important to those in a Kerberos environment, or who want better integration in a Windows Domain. In Ubuntu 10.04, setting up a kerberos client just got a lot easier.
When you install the krb5-config package, it will ask you some questions abot the realm you are in, etc. It does not do everything, but it does most of the work. I still had to edit /etc/krb5.conf to add in the hostname of the KDC, etc.
Installing libpam-krb5 does the right things to configure PAM. You can start to use it straight away, and it just works. For me, it also creates a kerberos ticket for you, which I don’t think it did before. This, to me, is a big deal. It means that I can use firefox to go into kerborized, and spnego enabled web sites without having to manually create a ticket before-hand. Same with kerborized ssh servers, and pidgin-sipe.
I tried libpam-ccreds too and it also just worked. Again, no messing with PAM configurations.
Connecting Pidgin to Office Communication Services
If you are in a Windows Domain and need to IM with your colleagues who are hanging out on Office Communicator, then pidgin-sipe does the job very well. If you hover over a buddy icon, then you can see what is on their calendar now. Pidgin also then sets your status according to what is on your calendar, so if you are scheduled for a meeting then it will set your status to busy at that time.
Mounting Windows File Shares
Once you have your kerberos ticket, then you can mount cifs file shares in the domain by running:
gvfs-mount smb://server-fqnd/share
The share is then set up in GNOME and you are not challenged for credentials. That means that with libpam-krb5 and a login script, you can have all your Windows shares auto-magically mounted when you log in. Nice!
Robert Hart 