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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: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:33PM (#21698)

    I have suggested loading them up with Ubuntu and a light-weight desktop like XFCE

    How about Debian and XFCE? Ubuntu has been going downhill for a while, and giving kids Ubuntu will further train them that being spied-upon is normal and acceptable, due to Ubuntu's past and ongoing practices. Since Ubuntu is based on Debian there shouldn't be any issue learning Debian if you're not already familiar with it.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:49PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:49PM (#21743)

    Debian is good, I have it running on a special laptop that is slower than anything else, with LXDE ; but I needed to download a .deb for the wifi's firmware manually and sudo dpkg -i (after installing from the .iso put on USB stick)

    It's better to install it from PXE booting (with wired networking), and the installer can actually offer you the option of enabing non free firmware if it is connected to the internet.

    Set up a proxy and use it when installing ; maybe just a squid with gigabytes of cache is enough to not download the same packages over and over again? else there are more specific proxy solutions or even cloning the whole debian repository (all + i386 architectures) if you can download ~200GB or more over ipv6.

    An issue is the default debian desktop is Gnome 3, which is too heavy and "3D accelerated" (that means decelerated on random old hardware) so you would need to install it command-line only and then apt-get a big list of packages, like running these commands : su ; cd ; scp blah@192.168.0.1:packages_list . ; apt-get install `cat packages_list`

    So you might as well use Ubuntu 12.04, which has the very same PXE installer and is used much the same as debian.. You can select the Xubuntu desktop during installation.

    • (Score: 0) by crutchy on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:52PM

      by crutchy (179) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:52PM (#21745) Homepage Journal

      can easily override default desktop to xfce at start of debian installer

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by stderr on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:56PM

      by stderr (11) on Wednesday March 26 2014, @09:56PM (#21773) Journal

      ... but I needed to download a .deb for the wifi's firmware manually and sudo dpkg -i (after installing from the .iso put on USB stick)

      You know there are unofficial install CDs with the non-free firmware blobs, right?

      Set up a proxy and use it when installing ; maybe just a squid with gigabytes of cache is enough to not download the same packages over and over again?

      I doubt you would need "gigabytes of cache". You don't really need to download that much.

      else there are more specific proxy solutions...

      ... like approx, apt-cacher or apt-cacher-ng.

      ... or even cloning the whole debian repository (all + i386 architectures) if you can download ~200GB or more over ipv6.

      A full Debian mirror would be totally overkill for most sane people and I have no idea why you even mentioned IPv6?

      An issue is the default debian desktop is Gnome 3, which is too heavy and "3D accelerated" (that means decelerated on random old hardware) so you would need to install it command-line only and then apt-get a big list of packages, like running these commands : su ; cd ; scp blah@192.168.0.1:packages_list . ; apt-get install `cat packages_list`

      No, no, no, no, NO!... That's not how you should set up and clone a Debian system to another box. For example, where did you get the packages_list from? Did you make it by hand? And what about the rest of the configuration, like the network settings, what mirrors to use and the timezone?

      A better way would be something like:

      First you select xfce during the initial install, so that's taken care of and Gnome won't be installed.

      Second you install debconf-utils and run dpkg --get-selections > packages.txt ; debconf-get-selections > debconf.txt on the box, thereby getting a list of the installed packages and their configuration.

      On the other boxes, you make a minimal install and copy packages.txt and debconf.txt to each of them.

      (If you want to, you can run dpkg --clear-selections, but I doubt it's needed and in case of very different hardware, you probably want to avoid it. The command will make the box forget about the state of all packages, but won't actually uninstall anything.)

      Then you run debconf-set-selections < debconf.txt ; dpkg --set-selections < packages.txt ; apt-get dselect-upgrade on the boxes. This will first configure all the packages (installed or about to be installed) the same way as on the original box, then tell the system about which packages to install and then finally install them.

      Keep the packages.txt and debconf.txt around in case one of the machines needs to be reinstalled later.

      --
      alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" # ... and get off my lawn!
  • (Score: 1) by xorsyst on Thursday March 27 2014, @10:43AM

    by xorsyst (1372) on Thursday March 27 2014, @10:43AM (#21975)

    I recently switched from Ubuntu to Mint for my test VMs, and I find Mint w/ XFCE to be an excellent choice.