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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: 4, Informative) by tynin on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:12PM

    by tynin (2013) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:12PM (#21675) Journal

    Setup a kickstart server [redhat.com]. Boot them up and select which ever OS you have configured to get installed (or define a default to take), and walk away for a few minutes.

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  • (Score: 1) by dublet on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:03PM

    by dublet (2994) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:03PM (#21719)

    This, very much this. Once you have the basic configuration set up, it's so easy to replicated. I used it in a previous job where one of my many duties was deploying installs on new machines for a turn key software/hardware solution. Being able to configure the kickstart with the appropriate rpms meant it was a piece of cake as took almost no time at all.