The last few months me and the other Debian Edu developers 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 signon, 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 pleasantly 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.