SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:33PM
Do you have a package cache for Debian (or whatever) and/or at least a http cache? 50 installs completing will result in 50 simultaneous security updates, so a decent cache could cut your total used bandwidth by a factor of about 50. Just thinking ahead a little.
An obvious question is what are they going to actually use the laptops for? My kids school seems to use google docs as the "office software" of choice and for file sharing, so you may as well install chrome while you're at it. And flash player.
(Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday March 26 2014, @07:37PM
Apt-Cacher or Apt-Cache-ng would be very, very useful. If you are on a 1GB LAN, then you get full LAN speeds for every installation after the first one.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:25PM
I haven't gotten to survey all the machines yet, but it being the Department of Education and the school being small with outdated machines and software, I'm surmising much of what they need to do is online, which linux can handle, and some of it will be pet programs to teach the alphabet, math, and that sort of thing. The latter I'm thinking I can set them up to run in WINE or some such if they're really attached to it. Else, I'll argue for open source equivalents installable from the usual repositories.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday March 28 2014, @12:36PM
Ah well what I was getting at tangentially is the kids probably need different software depending on local requirements. A great job for an automation system like Puppet.
So R, Pari/GP and Octave are probably not in much demand for 2nd grade compared to the pre-calc class in high school, of course I bet chrome and flashplayer are in near universal demand.
There are automation systems other than Puppet. If puppet didn't exist, I'd be forced to invent it, probably poorly.