Single sign-on suggestions?

[Eamonn Sullivan]

Our remaining Windows-based PC blew its hard drive a few weeks ago, so
I'm adding a second Ubuntu PC in the house. We also have a Mac. In a
decade or so of using Linux, I've not had to manage two
general-purpose desktops before. (I've previously run as many as three
at a time, but still only one desktop. The others were specialized --
backup or apache.) What I want to avoid is having to support another
whole set of user accounts. We're a family of seven, so it starts to
get unwieldy when I have seven accounts on the Mac, seven on the Linux
(Dapper) PC and seven more Samba accounts... I've spent the last
couple of weekends trying to understand LDAP. I got close once, in
that I semi-successfully migrated all of the original Unix accounts to
LDAP (sladp) and was able to log into the second PC using them
(complete with automatically created home directories when you log
into it the first time). However, Samba didn't quite work and the kids
use that all the time to log into their "homes" shares on the Mac or
Linux when working on the other. I've had to back out (a third time)
and comtemplating a third charge at the problem.

So I'm throwing this out for discussion here. I'm sure other people
have this problem. What's the simplist way to get single sign-on
working on Dapper? Is LDAP really the way to go or is it too
complicated for such a simple setup? Is anyone working on something
for edgy or beyond that I can help test?

-Eamonn