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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: 5, Informative) by NCommander on Wednesday March 26 2014, @08:46PM
The problem with doing mass deployment is some internal aspects will get copied across machines. If you setup something like sshd, then clone, every machine will have to same host key and such. This is a main reason I dislike clone based deployments because it can be tricky to eliminate all the specific machine based aspects. This gets more complicated because you have a lot of different hardware which means things like paritioning and such will be different machine to machine which means you image based deployment. If you want to look into this route, then create an OEM install from CD, do an OEM installation, then generate a clonezila image from it. OEM's firstrun script is pretty decent at scraping out user specific bits, but its not perfect.
The biggest gotcha here is you need to make sure all machines are BIOS booting, with no UEFI (some of those laptops can have UEFI firmware, UEFI been around for a *long* time), and that you use a 32-bit only setup.
That being said, you're best bet in my professional experience (and I deal w/ mass deployment for a living) is to leverage preseeding, and the netboot installer. Ubuntu has an OEM install which is exactly what you want, after deployment, it will run a first launch wizard to create the initial user, home folder, etc. I've never tried to fire oem-setup out of the preseed file so this might be more complicated than it appears at first glance.
This has the added advantage of making sure system updates are installed on the fly at upgrade time, instead of dealing with an increasely stale image, and (for the most part) preseeds are compatible between various versions of Ubuntu, so when 14.04 LTS drops down the shoot, it should just be a matter of setting up the 14.04 netboot installer with the same preseed and clicking run, as well as allowing machines that are 64-bit capable to get 64-bit software, and 32-bit only to only get 32-bit only.
Ubuntu preseeding is documented here: https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/i38 6/preseed-intro.html [ubuntu.com]
OEM installation information here is here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ubuntu_OEM_Insta ller_Overview [ubuntu.com]
The actual command that needs to be run is: oem-config-prepare (http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man8/ oem-config-prepare.8.html)
Incidentally, I'm NYC-based (in Manhattan) for the moment. While I can't make any promises, spending an afternoon getting this worked out over a weekend sounds like an enjoyable side project.
Still always moving