Hi all,

I'm a recovering Windows user, so please forgive me if this is a KDE 101 question.

I am a DOD smart card holder, and now that I've turned from the dark side I'm trying to do as much as possible with Linux, and fall back to VirtualBox as little as possible. I just (today!) managed to get FireFox working with CoolKey to allow signing on to PKI government sites, and I'm wondering about what is the current status of further smartcard integration into KDE.

I google'd and found a reference to a change that implied some level of support, and a long email thread written in KDE-development speak (which I'm not fluent in yet) which discussed it, but I'm still not clear at all.

I'm looking primarily for signed/encrypted email in KMail (I understand it can be done in Evolution, but I don't like the client so I haven't tried configuring it) but perhaps session locking/logging on at some point. Maybe changing pin numbers and stuff like that would be cool too.

Can anyone tell me what the status for KDE general smartcard support is? Thanks in advance for any responses...

Dion

KDE does not at this point support logging in / session locking using smart cards ( or anything other than passwords actually ). There has been a GSOC proposal this year, which if accepted will hopefully correct this in the future.

Not sure about KMail either, however it should be possible once you have configured your smart card with GPG. I do not know if it is able to help, but KGPG might be of help here, otherwise it will need to be configured manually.

Thanks for the response, it was very informative!

I took your suggestion and looked at GPG. In the brief time I tried I wasn't able to get it to work, but I know I'm still on the short end of the steep learning curve that is any new operating system. It seems at least that much functionality is available and more is coming.

Thanks again,

Dion

KGpg has no smartcard support by itself, it only reflects what GnuPG (gpg) can do and is configured for.