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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: 1) by youngatheart on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:38PM

    by youngatheart (42) on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:38PM (#22069)

    I try to keep a copy of Trinity Rescue Kit from http://trinityhome.org/ [trinityhome.org] around because it's useful for a variety of things. Last time I had cloning to do, I tried it because it was already handy. It made the job easy. Some of our machines wouldn't netboot, so I had to burn extra CDs, and in the end just started that way because it was faster than netbooting. It is easy, runs from bootable CDs and doesn't (necessarily need to) copy empty sectors.