Workstation Windows Active Directory Authentication

I work for a school district. I would like to use Ubuntu 7.10 as the primary OS for the elementary schools in the district. I have been using ubuntu myself for about three months and love it. I've been working on customizing the appearance of Ubuntu and installing software, etc. My issue for writing in is I can't figure out how to get Ubuntu to Authenticate against my current Windows Server 2003 Active Directory infrastructure. I want to be able to have students log in at a screen prompt, choose our domain type in their user name and password from the Windows AD environment and be authenticated.

I've been reading the forums and the answer section for some time now. Some people mention that Kerberos will do this others say install Samba. I understand that I need Samba to access network resources from the distro but, that's not what I'm looking for.

I really want any student to be able to log into any workstation and be able to access their personal files from their home directories and have the appropriate security restrictions placed on them. Once I can get a the distro setup approriatley and the students authenticating and accessing their files I want to be able to package the distro so I can deploy it through a image deployment product. Is there a "sysprep" for Ubuntu?

Thank you for taking the time to read this...

J