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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: 4, Interesting) by fliptop on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:05PM

    by fliptop (1666) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:05PM (#21668) Journal

    They do have 50 old Dell laptops running XP

    If that's the case you'd better do hardware tests 1st. I've found the Ultimate Boot CD [ultimatebootcd.com] very helpful and it may have all the software you need. I usually run Seatools on the hard drive and Memtest86+ on the RAM.

    If it all checks out ok, and the hardware is similar, you can then use the CopyWipe clone tool after you finish your 1st install of Ubuntu (or whatever).

    --
    Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:03PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:03PM (#21751)

    It's useful to have that kind of stuff on a PXE boot menu, at least memtest86. I did not know that Seatools was useful for some checks (do you do something in particular with it, or just read SMART information?)

    Those utilities and many other come on .img files, floppy disk images. PXE can load memdisk which can load one of them. If you set up a menu (which can be crude : just display a list of options and you type what you want to run and hit return) you can boot from the network and have the choice of running memtest, seatools, a DOS boot floppy, debian and ubuntu installers for multiple versions, sbm (tool for booting arbitrary local drive or media), a command-line "linux rescue" that runs in ramdrive and was specially pacakged to load over PXE (if you can find one)

    It's much better than a CD, since you don't even need to carry the CD around (and burn it) and failed or missing optical drives (as well as BIOS unable to boot a USB thumb drive) aren't a concern.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by fliptop on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:32PM

      by fliptop (1666) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:32PM (#21762) Journal

      I did not know that Seatools was useful for some checks (do you do something in particular with it, or just read SMART information?)

      If the hard drive controller is recognized (which it sometimes is not), Seatools can be used to do a surface test on a hard drive to locate bad sectors and other errors. It works on any brand of hard drive. It's the 1st thing I do when I get a computer on the bench, because there's no point in trying to fix anything if the hard drive is (going) bad.

      In the event the controller is not recognized, I usually pull the hard drive and plug it into a desktop I keep for that purpose (and also for cloning). It has a motherboard w/ both IDE and SATA connectors.

      --
      Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
      • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @05:47AM

        by davester666 (155) on Thursday March 27 2014, @05:47AM (#21937)

        So, for the guy posting the question, your responses are, well, useless. Or rather, they amount to, no, you can't mass install Ubuntu, you need to disassemble EVERY SINGLE LAPTOP, verify that the components are the same or not [i guess, try to put them in piles where the laptops use the same components, hope he doesn't wind up with 50 piles], and then figure out which ones will actually run Ubuntu.

        Who doesn't think Open Source is fun.

        • (Score: 2) by nukkel on Thursday March 27 2014, @11:31AM

          by nukkel (168) on Thursday March 27 2014, @11:31AM (#21991)

          Fair enough, but what else is he going to do when faced with 50 different laptops each of which may or may not be working compeletely or partially.

          I guess he could mass-install anyway and then weed out the bad ones...

          • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:12PM

            by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:12PM (#22054) Journal

            This is the sort of thing I was asking about. In my mind's eye I pictured setting up 50 laptops on big tables in the school library, setting them to netboot from the BIOS, and then walking down a line clicking OK 50 times over and over. Running disk checks is a good idea, and it means another iteration I need to budget time for. I haven't seen all the machines yet but take it for granted that it's a heterogeneous mix. In the end I'm trying to ballpark the time/space I need to do it, and I'd like to get it done as smoothly as possible. Through the PTA I've been championing the idea of raising the school's profile by starting a makerspace, implementing Coding in Schools, and participating in programs like Dean Kamen's FIRST, but I see this first effort as a confidence building measure.

            Thanks for the comments and thoughts, guys.

            --
            Washington DC delenda est.