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