We had of number of these delivered to the Gentoo PowerPC Team who will now be working with us on implementing this technology to access the Sun Grid, a ODW voice/video conferencing network and our trial with Grammy Awarding winning recording star, Kim Carnes. Here are the links:

We have selected this provider:

www.athena-scs.com

Here is our blog about Kim:

http://bbrv.blogspot.com/2005/02/chasin ... rains.html

R&B

Progress...

This news in from Pieter Van den Abeele over the weekend:

"The smartcard reader is great. its drivers are up to date and actively maintained. I am using the PC/SC standard Microsoft introduced to access the cardreader under Linux. It is possible to give the smartcard reader/writer a name. It currently shows up as 'Gentoo smartcard reader', but this can easily be set to 'Genesi smartcard reader' (or something else). The thing reads all my smartcards just fine, including my identity card and bank card. We couldn't have picked a better smartcard reader."

Again, here is the reader we chose:

http://www.athena-scs.com/product.asp?pid=1

Instead of the cards supplied by Athena we have switched to these cards:

http://www.scmegastore.com/st_prod.html ... 6&p_catid=

Once we have these up and running we will go ahead and distribute the first ten readers and cards to the Gentoo PowerPC Team.

From there we have a mind to distribute cards and readers to the following groups:

1. Polish Team at Politechnice Częstochowskiej

2. The AmigaZeux Team - http://www.amigazeux.org/

3. The Hungarian Pegasos Team - http://www.pegasos.hu/

If you would like to be included please drop us a note.

Ideally, all these people would be able to "tune-in" to the Sun Grid, v/v conference, Kim Carnes jam session, etc.

Once we have made progress there we will move up to this card:

http://www.scmegastore.com/st_prod.html ... 7&p_catid=

You will notice the SunRay connection and of course the ability to add loyalty/micropayment features...

R&B

bbrv

This is fantastic news. I KNOW you are excited by this development. Genesi working closely with the Gentoo guys is yielding great results.

However, I would like to request some sort of LiveCD for a Gentoo environment for the Pegasos that is installable as well. A good idea for this Live CD would also be a customized version with Smartcard enabled drivers as well so you could just pop a Gentoo live CD into the peg and be able to use the smart card technology.

The reason I ask for this is we have no Linux Live CD for the Peg ATM and from talks with dholm it wouldnt be that difficult.


Addionally, it would be great if the MOS guys or 3rd party mos devs could get a hold of the source code for MOS port as well..

magnetic

Hi guys,

My first post to ppczone

I have a Gentoo PowerPC X-LiveDVD building. You'll be surprised, believe me It has Games, some special OpenGL stuff ( you can start speculating now ) and some cool multimedia applications.

The SmartCards are working great. Integrates well with PAM authentication (so you can use a smartcard to log in), if you don't have a reader attached PAM drops to the regular password based authentication. The thing also integrates with LDAP. So basically if your company has an LDAP/Directory service up and running on the network, you'll be able to store your public certificate in LDAP instead of on the machine with the smartcard reader. This makes smartcard readers ideal for applications such as Internet Cafés etc.

I've also got some smaller X-LiveCDs building, mostly the same applications, just grouped and some things stripped out.

As usual uploading will take a while and it makes giving exact eta's difficult. The plan is to distribute it using bittorrent.

As boot-splash theme I was thinking about something metalic like



but I accept cool wallpapers, graphics etc. You can mail me links at pvdabeel@gentoo.org . All feedback and input is appreciated.

Happy PPCing

Pieter Van den Abeele


Oh, and btw Matt. This website has brilliant graphics. Have you got some stuff I can borrow?

pvdabeel

Hi

Thanks for posting. I'm glad you did and it sounds exciting this project. Its interesting there are so many people doing independent developments that no one knows about and then Bam! they release it and everyone is surprised. Thanks for posting and congrats on your first!

What you and dholm and other Gentoo ppl are doing with Genesi is exactly the right idea..

The bittorrent idea is good, but maybe Genesi can host it or so. The splash image looks great, for help with graphics alot of the cool ones are done by Andre Siegel (sp) aka Jobbo - maybe contact him for some custom gentoo images or something.

Also, does this LiveDVD have a nice gui installer? Thank you for all your hard work and keep it up!

magnetic

Andre and Pieter are working together now. You can expect some exciting things to come from this development.

R&B

On a Smartcard enabled Open Desktop Workstation, the login screen looks like this:



If you click the thumbnail, you'll notice how the Gnome Login Manager detects the reader and switches to smartcard authentication. Password authentication is kept as a fallback option.

I've also ported Sun GRID engine 6 to PowerPC. SGE6 and an Apple XGRID agent are both included on the upcoming livecds/dvd.

Nest step...



For more information, check out Pieter's blog...

http://metadistribution.org/blog/archiv ... 05.php#e32

Good stuff!

R&B