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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 VLM on Friday March 28 2014, @12:36PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 28 2014, @12:36PM (#22478)

    Ah well what I was getting at tangentially is the kids probably need different software depending on local requirements. A great job for an automation system like Puppet.

    So R, Pari/GP and Octave are probably not in much demand for 2nd grade compared to the pre-calc class in high school, of course I bet chrome and flashplayer are in near universal demand.

    There are automation systems other than Puppet. If puppet didn't exist, I'd be forced to invent it, probably poorly.

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