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: 1) by resignator on Thursday March 27 2014, @11:39AM
Burn a few live CDs or USB boot your favorite linux distro and test the machines first. You dont want to find out 5-10 of those computers wont play nice after you have committed yourself.
Pick a live distro:
Knoppix -http://knoppix.net/ [knoppix.net] - optimized for speed and uses some default Debian apps
#! -http://crunchbang.org/ [crunchbang.org] - optimized for speed and uses some default Debian apps
Ubuntu -http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/try-ubuntu -before-you-install [ubuntu.com] - too bloated for my tastes but it makes windows users feel at home
Debian -http://www.debian.org/CD/live/ [debian.org] - I typically go this route. Openbox, Thunar, and tint2 or xfce4-panel make for a great desktop environment that is fast and lightweight. You can even use Remastersys once you have it set the way you like and create your own custom live cd.