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Ask Soylent -- Mass Linux Installations

posted by LaminatorX on Wednesday March 26 2014, @06:51PM   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: 5, Insightful) by Tork on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:03PM

    by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:03PM (#21666)
    Are they all identical?
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  • (Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:09PM

    by GungnirSniper (1671) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:09PM (#21673) Journal

    How much does that matter on current distros of Linux or even Windows 7? Last time I did cloning, it mattered down to chipset level. :(

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by Tork on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:18PM

      by Tork (3914) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:18PM (#21684)
      Dell laptops vary so much on a monthly basis that chipsets could very well be different. It's a fair question.
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      • (Score: 4, Informative) by fliptop on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:29PM

        by fliptop (1666) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:29PM (#21693) Journal

        Dell laptops vary so much on a monthly basis

        Agreed, there have been times when I thought Dell never makes the same laptop twice. Identical models can have different wireless NIC's, hard drives, and yes, chipsets. In fact, the only parts you can reliably assume are the same are the keyboard, battery and screen.

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        • (Score: 5, Informative) by melikamp on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:59PM

          by melikamp (1886) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:59PM (#21716) Journal
          I concur. I went through this when trying to buy a Linux-compatible laptop from them. Dell themselves can't tell which chipsets are in use.