Regardless of which OS you run on the target machine, there are certain minimum software requirements your system must meet before you attempt to Vincentize your system using the software described in this HOWTO. These software components ship standard with RedHat 6.0 and above, as well as many other recent Linux distributions. If you're not sure if your OS includes these components, check your distribution's documentation for details.
Pluggable Authentication Modules is a standard, originally proposed by Sun Microsystems, which allows an administrator to reconfigure the authentication methods used by a service. RedHat, the latest release of SuSE, and the upcoming release of Debian (potato) all use PAM by default; it is also available in FreeBSD. If /etc/pam.conf or /etc/pam.d/ is present on your system, you have PAM installed. PAM version 0.68 or newer is recommended.
In addition to PAM, many recent versions of libc support NSS. NSS is a back-end to many standard functions that allows programs to get information about user accounts, printers, home directories, network services, etc. from a variety of different sources, such as local files, DNS, NIS, and LDAP. Project Vincent distributes information about user accounts using Hesiod, so you will need a Hesiod NSS module for your system. Under Linux, nss_hesiod is included with glibc 2.1 and above.
There are a number of packages available for Unix which automatically mount network home directories. Under Linux, the package which works most readily with Project Vincent home directories is autofs. Autofs is supported under all Linux 2.2 kernels, and ships with many recent distributions.