Re: [school-discuss] Donating 500 F/OSS Computers to Schools... SATURDAY!! (Pizza & Schwag from Mozilla!!)

["R. Scott Belford" <scott@xxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew Fife wrote:
> We're trying to donate 500 Ubuntu computers to SF Bay Area schools this
> SATURDAY... and we need your help!

Aloha Andrew

Great initiative; I wish you well.  If it is of any help, HOSEF started 
doing things this way last year, and I developed a few processes that 
made it rather easy.  Two of us knocked out 75 computers for schools in 
the Philippines last December, and this included cracking the case and 
installing the hard drive.  It took us about 8 hours.

The Recipe for success includes

1 Clonezilla server per location
1 sda and one hda master image made from a 4gb or smaller drive
4 or more work spaces networked and powered.  You can use the same 
keyboards and mice, but you may want to marry each monitor with a computer
4 or more ebnet boot diskettes
4 or more clonezilla cd's

One person gets the computers ready.  This can include running memtest. 
 You can boot clients to a memtest session using clonezilla.  In 
batches of whatever, you etherboot the clients from the clonezilla 
server.  By having prepared sda and hda images on 4gb, drives, you can 
clone anything in minutes.

After the computers are cloned and rebooted, run sudo dpkg-reconfigure 
xserver-xorg from the console you will likely be dumped to when X11 
fails.  Then edit your /etc/udev/profiles.d/z25_persistent-net.rules 
file that has attached the golden images' mac address to eth0 and the 
newly created computers' mac address to eth1.  Eliminate the eth0 entry, 
change eth1 to eth0, and reboot.

When rebooting, boot into a thin client session again.  This time don't 
launch memtest and don't image the machine.  Instead, launch 
another-client session from your clonezilla server.  Now run gparted to 
resize your partition.  You now have an imaged machine, the partition is 
resized, networking and graphics are working, and you are ready to run 
oem-prepare.

The next person who turns it on will set the username and password.

With a little planning and some help, 10 people could do 500 computers 
in a day.  Please let me know if I can be of any assistance or offer any 
more insight.  I've been to James' place at ACCRC; a true masterpiece of 
human service.  I wish I lived near enough to come get down and dirty 
with all this FOSS lovin'.  Have fun, please.
> -Andrew

--scott

--
R. Scott Belford
Founder/Executive Director
The Hawaii Open Source Education Foundation
P.O. Box 2644
Ewa Beach, HI 96706
808.689.6518 phone/fax
scott@xxxxxxxxx

HOSEF is a charitable non-profit with a mission to promote Free and Open 
Source Software by building learning opportunities around previously 
discarded but still functional computers.  We appreciate the time you 
have taken to reach out to us. Beginning in 2008 we have to strongly 
encourage kind contributors like yourself to make a donation with your 
equipment.  This enables us to put computers in parks, schools, 
community centers, developing countries, and the hands of children 
needing them the most.

If you have questions, please contact us at donations@xxxxxxxxx

The current suggested schedule for donations is:

PCs and laptops P4 and faster   Free
PCs and laptops PII and faster  $10
G3 iMacs/books and faster -     $10
17' monitors and larger         $10
Additional Keyboards            $1
Additional Mice                 $1
Scanners                        $1
Inkjet Printers                 $1
Laser Printers < 25 lbs         $20
Laser Printers > 25 lbs         $20
Servers, Sun equipment          contact us
Non-functional equipment        $.75/lb.

If you are requesting a pickup, please give us your address, times of 
availability, and, if you intend to leave the equipment for us, the form 
of payment.  Dropoffs are available if arrangements are made in advance.