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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 Popeidol on Thursday March 27 2014, @06:01AM

    by Popeidol (35) on Thursday March 27 2014, @06:01AM (#21939) Journal

    +1 for FOG. You build the image you want on one computer, PXE boot it into fog, and upload the image. Then you PXE boot the other computers and pull it down. You can track everything through the web interface, and it lets you set up different groups - in your case it might be for different hardware configurations or for different computer labs.

    It also lets you batch deploy new images to existing hosts. You could skip running individual updates on each machine, run them once on your master, and then push it out to everybody overnight.

    The most labour-intensive part is adding each host to the FOG server, after that it's a breeze.

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:18PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:18PM (#22057) Journal

    Thanks, guys, this sounds quite workable for the situation.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.