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Ask Soylent -- Mass Linux Installations

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 26 2014, @02:51PM   Printer-friendly
from the Pencils-&-Penguins dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

My daughter attends a small public school in Brooklyn that has asked me to help them figure out the best way to get working computers into the hands of more of their students. They are too small to have their own sysadmin or to be allocated budget to simply buy all new laptops for everyone, and they're so small that they fall far down on the Department of Education's list of priorities.

They do have 50 old Dell laptops running XP that are so full of cruft now as to barely work, so I have suggested loading them up with Ubuntu and a light-weight desktop like XFCE. Installing 50 laptops one-by-one, though, is still a lot of work so I have been exploring doing a mass installation with PXE or Clonezilla.

I haven't attempted anything like this before, so I thought perhaps there are Soylentils who have and could give me a heads-up about potential gotchas they have come across in the past, and which aren't so easy to find via Googling. Ideally I'd like to be able to set aside a Saturday to go in, queue up the machines in the library, and get them chunking through the installation in parallel. Thanks, folks!

 
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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by pjbgravely on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:47PM

    by pjbgravely (1681) <pjbgravelyNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Wednesday March 26 2014, @03:47PM (#21710) Homepage
    I would install on one box, get everything working perfectly. Set up a local ubuntu repository in a small dedicated server. Point the install to that and check updating. Set up automatic updating and a user account. Lock down sudo account. Set up shh with a key

    Use a cloning tool and put the clone onto each machine. Change IP address and host name and the box is good to go. If you want to add software add it to your repository and change the xfce desktop .apt file to add your program change up a point. The next time the machine updates it will automatically install.
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