In this previous post from last year, I talked about how to use a DoD Common Access Card with Firefox under Ubuntu Linux. That post is still accurate if you have an older pre-144K CAC. However, if you have a new 144K CAC, coolkey will probably not work for you. I found that out the hard way two nights ago. Providentially, though, Roy Keene over at SoftwareForge (need a CAC to access) also found the problem and devised a solution: cackey.
I could not get cackey to install from its 64-bit deb file. dpkg claimed an architecture mismatch — amd64 vs. x86_64. So, I went to the terminal and used
sudo dpkg –force-architecture -i cackey_0.5.20-1_amd64.deb
That worked like a charm. Then, when installing the CAC reader into Firefox, use the instructions from the earlier post except browse to /usr/lib64/libcackey.so for the path. That enabled Firefox to read my CAC and log into it.
While we’re on the topic, the current version of the DoD Configuration extension is 1.2. Again, you need a CAC to access these files, so you’ll have to download them from a government computer.
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