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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: 2, Interesting) by toygeek on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:09PM
Consider this my Official recommendation for #! linux. If you can do one install and customize it and then distribute it, it'll serve you well. I am currently running it on a Compaq V5000 laptop, Celeron 1.46 with 1.5GB memory. It runs *great*. You can read my overview of it here:
http://www.tidbitsfortechs.com/2014/02/project-505 0-conclusion/ [tidbitsfortechs.com]
I have $100 into this laptop including a $40 battery, and its runs great even for the work stuff I need to do (which isn't minimal). #! has proven itself to be a great OS for this older machine. My boot time to a web page is just over 60 seconds. Check it out!
http://crunchbanglinux.org/ [crunchbanglinux.org]
There is no Sig. Okay, maybe a short one. http://miscdotgeek.com