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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) by Jaruzel on Thursday March 27 2014, @09:11AM

    by Jaruzel (812) on Thursday March 27 2014, @09:11AM (#22022) Homepage Journal

    Pick any installation method from the above comments. That's the easy bit.

    It gets hard when you realise that all kids have this innate and almost magical ability to completely f*ck up any computer within 5 minutes of touching the mouse.

    What you have to plan for is the quick and easy re-imaging of EACH box, at any time, and by any one.

    If you go the route of a central distribtuon server (or even if you dont), I seriously recommend a clone image of EACH laptop on large HDD somewhere, preferably easy to get to (maybe bootable), with a nice menu so that even a numpty can re-install 'LAPTOP-nn's personal image if they need to.

    Trust me, if you don't do something like this, you'll never get your life back, and you can kiss goodbye to every free Saturday you have from now until eternity.

    -Jar

    --
    Wash at 40°C, and hand dry only. My MUD Engine [jaruzel.com]
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