Ubuntu looked awesome and mostly things worked. But in the months since I pretty much stopped using it, I found that a different distribution is doing more work to help out on the smart card front. I switched to Fedora Core 6.
The primary motivation is that my smart card compiled library stopped working everywhere and the new recommendation was to use CoolKey from fedora. I suffered through a pile of I-don't-what-version-it-is problems and finally got to the point of having the library detect the smart card. Nothing I did made the smart card actually work with Firefox again. Then I was tempted by the smart card login idea. I never got that work either. The last straw for Ubuntu was installing the Lotus SameTime 7.5 client. It was an RPM and it refused to install because of missing dependencies. I couldn't figure out why, although the dependencies were there, it wouldn't install. ...then the Ubuntu color of yellow/brown/orange started getting to me.
I installed FC6 and appreciated the blue-ness. CoolKey worked out of the box. All I did was install the Firefox plug in for DOD. Its a huge time saver. Also, I think I may have had to install the CoolKey security device myself, but that was easy. Magic, and then the smart card worked. Then I tackled the smart card login. Everything was already installed for it as well, except for the Root certificate authority certificates. I needed to install the ones that correlated to the smart card I was using. Then I just followed the instructions that I'll have to post here later since I can't remember them. Then it just worked with the USB reader.
