Monday, April 26, 2010

How do you manage multiple Ubuntu desktops?

I spent a large part of my day at work trying to figure out how to replicate Windows style login scripts for our office Ubuntu desktops. This seemed like a straight forward problem that some amount of community effort would have already solved. It was so easy to setup Active Directory (AD) integration with Likewise-open so where is the howto on setting up automatic drive mapping on a Gnome desktop?

There are mass management tools like CFGengine and Puppet for server farms but where are the tools for running an office on Linux desktops? There are some proprietary offerings from Likewise (the contributers of Likewise-open) and Centrify that provide tools for integrating AD group policy objects (GPO) but they are geared toward fortune 2000 size companies. I'm looking for something beyond just being able to authenticate with a AD and connect to a CIFS share. If Linux and especially Ubuntu are ever going to really crack the desktop market, someone needs to launch a project to bridge this small enterprise gap.

No comments:

Post a Comment