Red Hat Plans Linux Desktop Offering 'for the Masses' (eWeek)

Posted Mar 20, 2007 4:17 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]

Sounds like they want to elaborate on the Desktop offering by also using Samba as a "Active Directory"-style server.

If you check out the features of Samba 4 (which currently has technology preview release aviable for testing and evalulation) they have put work into making "CIFS" much more Linux-friendly and making it more on par with Windows 2000/2003 features.

One of the things I think they've been working on is if both the client and server are identified as Linux systems it will by-pass all the Windows-compatability crud and get better performance. CIFS is a very loose specification, so I am told, so it's easy to add Linux-specific features to it and yet retain compatability.

Also one of the big big things for it is that they are getting proper kerberos-based authentication support and support the MS-specific extention for kerberos that they use for logins and other such things. Since then it's kerberos then there is already all sorts of support with it for Linux.

I think that Novell was working very closely with Samba to get these sort of features enabled for their desktop. But obviously Novell has seriously pissed them off with the whole horrific Microsoft-Novell patent deal. Redhat, it seems this article is hinting at, is looking to pick up the slack and integrate this stuff into their own Redhat directory services and their stateless Linux project.

Effectively what you'd have is a competitive Open Source/Free software alternative to Novell's closed source eDirectory setup and Microsoft's Active Directory, with Windows-compatability included.

That is my guess about what they are talking about.