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gsmartcard 0.1.5-2
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                        Gnome Smart Card readme file
                       (last modified Oct 19th, 2000)

License:

Gsmartcard is released under the conditions of the GNU General Public
License. See the file COPYING included in this software package for
details. This program comes with NO WARRANTY of any kind and is provided
as "AS IS". See section 11 of the GNU General Public License.


Warning:

Do not use this software to store important data, encryption keys
or otherwise critical information on smart cards! If you loose your
data it's your fault. If you use this program to store anything important
on cards, you're insane. You have been warned.


Installing:

The short way:

	./configure
	make
	make install (as root).

If you want to remove the program from your system you can do so with
"make uninstall".


Requirements:

This program depends on Gnome/GTK. It is a good idea to have the latest
versions of both packages and all related libraries/packages installed.
In addition you'll need the program "smartcard" from
http://www.lionking.org/~kianga/software/smartcard/ . All card access and all
card operations are running via this program. And all limitations/bugs
apply to gsmartcard as well. ;-)
See the smartcard website for further details.


Status:

- Only plain ASCII text can be written onto a card. You can view the card's
  content in hexadecimal format, but it will be treated as plaintext when it
  is written onto the card. An embeded hex-editor is needed.

- Preferences options almost done. Currently "card auto read" and "card auto
  save" do nothing.

- Items that are grey are still missing.

- smartcard does only support simple memory cards at the moment.

- We currently have only dumb memory cards and a cheap memory/PIN card
  for testing. If you feel like donating some more advanced chipcards
  (we could really need processor cards with protocols like T0 and T1)
  please do so. :-)


Little FAQ:

- The program doesn't display icons on the buttons and complains about
  missing pixmaps.

	This normally happens when you have installed Gnome in a different
	location like /usr/local/gnome. gsmartcards's pixmaps are installed
	in /usr/local/share/pixmaps/gsmartcard, but Gnome expects them to
	be in /usr/local/gnome/share/pixmaps/gsmartcard.
	As a workaround symlink /usr/local/gnome/share/pixmaps/gsmartcard
	to /usr/local/share/pixmaps/gsmartcard.

- I put my only copy of my GPG key on a card and the program just wiped out
  the whole card accidently. How do you think I get my key back?

	That's not my problem... basically. :-)  If you use this program
	to do store anything important, you're insane.


Possible uses:

There is a PAM module somewhere that you can use to authenticate yourself
using chipcards. However, all the modules does right now (if I remember
that correctly) is to check if a card is inserted or not. With a little
more work on this module a real cool authentication system could be
implemented. Type your username, put in the card and you're logged in.

Another cool usage would be for GPG. You can put your key on a card
(maybe a programmable processor card that checks the terminal it was
inserted so it only works on your system, or a card with PIN that you enter
instead your passphrase... whatever) and have GPG read the decryption key
from the card.

You could put the key of your encrypted filesystem on a card and let it read
the key from there a boot time and make your system only bootable with a card.

Has anyone seen a card reader with integrated fingerprint scanner? That could
be used to access/activate the card and then read the key from it.


Localization:

If you want to translate the program into a new language I'd be happy
to include your translation.


Documentation:

I would call it "not yet implemented". Most of the documentation about
card reading/writing can be found in the smartcard program package. The
frontend should be pretty self explanatory.
I will write something up as soon as I figure out how the Gnome help system
works. :-)
No, the included manpage is not meant as a full documentation. It's just a
general overview.