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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: 2) by davester666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @05:47AM

    by davester666 (155) on Thursday March 27 2014, @05:47AM (#21937)

    So, for the guy posting the question, your responses are, well, useless. Or rather, they amount to, no, you can't mass install Ubuntu, you need to disassemble EVERY SINGLE LAPTOP, verify that the components are the same or not [i guess, try to put them in piles where the laptops use the same components, hope he doesn't wind up with 50 piles], and then figure out which ones will actually run Ubuntu.

    Who doesn't think Open Source is fun.

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  • (Score: 2) by nukkel on Thursday March 27 2014, @11:31AM

    by nukkel (168) on Thursday March 27 2014, @11:31AM (#21991)

    Fair enough, but what else is he going to do when faced with 50 different laptops each of which may or may not be working compeletely or partially.

    I guess he could mass-install anyway and then weed out the bad ones...

    • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:12PM

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:12PM (#22054) Journal

      This is the sort of thing I was asking about. In my mind's eye I pictured setting up 50 laptops on big tables in the school library, setting them to netboot from the BIOS, and then walking down a line clicking OK 50 times over and over. Running disk checks is a good idea, and it means another iteration I need to budget time for. I haven't seen all the machines yet but take it for granted that it's a heterogeneous mix. In the end I'm trying to ballpark the time/space I need to do it, and I'd like to get it done as smoothly as possible. Through the PTA I've been championing the idea of raising the school's profile by starting a makerspace, implementing Coding in Schools, and participating in programs like Dean Kamen's FIRST, but I see this first effort as a confidence building measure.

      Thanks for the comments and thoughts, guys.

      --
      Washington DC delenda est.