This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

One more step towards local user and net user unification is going to be reality soon for the GNOME desktop environment.

A team of GNOME developers has already started the implementation of Enterprise Accounts and the user panel changes for active directory enrollment have been included in gnome-control-center 3.5.4.

User identities may be centrally managed, via LDAP or Kerberos. These situations should be supported in some form. This includes:

Showing whether the user is currently authenticated (‘logged in’) to any (and if so, which) domains.

Notifying the user if a ticket or password expires and offering to renew it

Offering a way to authenticate to a domain after logging in locally (ie ‘kinit’)

Offering an API for applications to request the log in into a domain (‘kinit’)

Authenticating to a domain when initially logging in

The objective is for the user to be able to configure Kerberos easily. All this configuration will happen on the GNOME initial setup screen, where the user will be able to enter his/her corporate domain name and user name + password.