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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!
(Score: 2, Informative) by calmond on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:41PM
While it is probably not the best way to go, you can actually image a computer with just ssh. Boot a live cd on the target system, and run this command:
ssh root@sourcesystem dd if=/dev/sda | dd of=/dev/sda
You can image one, then two, then four, etc. and depending on the network, have it done in an afternoon or two.
(Score: 2, Informative) by KiloByte on Thursday March 27 2014, @01:41AM
dd-ing a whole drive that's only 1% full is a major waste of time, though.
(Score: 1) by calmond on Friday March 28 2014, @08:47AM
No doubt - that's why I mentioned that it probably isn't the best way to do it - but it is a nice trick to know!