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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) by Phoenix666 on Thursday March 27 2014, @02:41PM
I share your caution. I have general notions of doing the install, setting update to automatic, handing root to the music teacher who doubles as their de facto sysadmin, and parachuting in as needed when he gets in over his head. There's a broader picture, though. My daughter is in pre-K at the school, which is down the block from us. It has been traditionally neglected by the Dept. of Education because it is small, in a neighborhood that was always populated with poorer families/demographics. Now it is in the middle of half a dozen high-end residential high-rises in the hottest family-oriented neighborhood in NYC. So there's an opportunity to remake the place into a kick-ass STEM-focused wunderkind that will set my daughter and son (a year behind her) up for permanent academic success. So the mass installation is a confidence-building measure that will help me make the case for doing much, much more. I have dreams of getting Raspberry Pi's into the hands of every kid and teaching them to code with Scratch, of Arduino-based robotics and interactive features in the school, and basically turning it into a wonderland of STEM that the kids are clamoring to get to every day.
Washington DC delenda est.