So I do tech support for a mid size company.I was able to convince one of out clients, a large school district, to install linux on all these old out of warranty netbooks they have. Approximately 1,100 or 1,200.

I have never mass deployed linux before so I need your help!

Help me LinuxQuestions.org you are my Only Hope!

Now for the nitty gritty details.

We think the imaging process will go like so. We grab ~100 netbooks from the warehouse take them to the shop and blast the image on them. Deliver them to a school and pick up all the netbooks at that school. Take those back to the shop and blast the image on 'em and repeat the process.

I see two options for how we can put linux on them. A network based multicast imaging solutions like Clonezilla or bootable USB keys with the image on them and something like partimage.

The Clonezilla route seems like it would be faster for imaging them all while they are in the shop assuming I get it working. The Sr network engineer has let me use one of their 48 port Cisco Catalyst switches before, during the Windows 7 migration. So I might be able to use it again for this project. The problem I see with this method is once they are all imaged and at the schools. I doubt the Sr Network Engineer would let me run my own imaging server on his enterprise network. So when ever we get a call for one of these linux netbooks we would have to bring it back to the shop and have say a 8 port switch and a server to image them.

Using 20 or 30 USB drives with the image on them and a linux livecd with partimage or something like terabytes image for linux is another option I think could work. After I set one netbook up I imaged it and was able to put down the image on another netbook in less than 5 minutes. So we could have each tech sitting at a table with a stack of netbooks and 3 or 4 flash drive and they just crank them out. The USB keys also have the advantage that once everything is deployed we just keep say 10 of the USB keys in a box. When ever they get a call for one of the linux netbooks they just grab one and head over there to reimage on site.

As for the hardware. They are mostly HP Mini 5102s, so Atom N450 CPUs, 160GB HDDs, but gig ethernet ports. Also Broadcom BCM43224 wireless card (how they will connect to the network once deployed).

They are all 2 or 3 years out of warranty. And they want to still make use out of them by making them internet stations. Just a basic machine with chrome on it so they can search the web to research papers or projects and whatnot.
I tried out several distros on these machines: Debian, Arch, Archbang, Puppy, & OpenSuSE. I'm Thinking we will use debian. Possibly OpenSuSE, I hadn't used it until I started playing around with it for this project. But I'm liking it. I’m not to worried about maintaining them. If there is a problem just reimage it and keep them running until the hardware dies or until 2016 when they get a new bond and will buy something new. Chromebooks or iPads most likely


So I assume lots of people here have had experience mass deploying linux. What is your 2 cents? What would you suggest? Are there better solutions I don't know about? What are some problems you experienced?

If you're going openSUSE (which I prefer, but that's personal preference), you can use AutoYAST to do exactly what you're after:
http://doc.opensuse.org/products/dra....autoinst.html

After you install one machine and get it set up correctly, you can click "Clone this system for AutoYAST". From there, it can use either a network or physical (DVD/CD) media to get the necessary packages/software.

You could also find something useful here, if you decide upon the Debian route:
https://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu
I've only messed with the terminal server but that seems to suggest that BOOTP etc. would be good to go if the netbooks have it.

Look into using http://www.systemimager.org/, which likely will do the job for you.

1 members found this post helpful.

this is what i do whenever i lose my fedora live-usb and it works pretty well:but that is only for this one disk.

maybe create a live-usb and edit the liveuser's ~/.bash_profile so that the last line has something like:[untested] the above could work well if the image is hosted on an nfs/sshfs share. then you would just need to boot up the machine, wait 30 seconds for it to start the dd process, then unplug the usb drive and connect it to the next pc.

This would cause it to run on every shell opened immediately and without question (provided on root shell, otherwise would block)
Maybe at least a quick pause before issuing the destroy disk command like this? I get that it will be used more or less exclusively on safe devices, but what happens if he opens a shell on it while it's running? It'll wipe the original, and if a unknowing person put it in the wrong one, ouch.

^ good point. not sure what progress op made but maybe add an entry to liveusers crontab as an @reboot directive.

or maybe put it in /etc/rc.local ?

Check this out for Debian,
http://debian-handbook.info/browse/s...ct.install-net

http://debian-handbook.info/browse/s....html#sect.fai
http://debian-handbook.info/browse/s...d-i-preseeding

For the love of all that is $HOLY, do not attempt to use Arch on these netbooks.

I say this as a committed Archer.

It would be irresponsible to use such an operating system in a set up such as you describe.

Arch needs very careful maintenance and cannot be "blindly updated" -- each update would have to be monitored and checked.

Arch requires regular updates to maintain stability.

Don't do it!

Thanks for the replies everyone. I will address them in the end. I will update you with what I have done so far.

I finished the first batch of netbooks. 108 of them. I decided to go with openSUSE. I imaged them all using clonezilla. There were a few kinks in the first couple rounds but I've got those mostly worked out. The wireless wouldn't connect after image, I had to go to the wireless profile and remove the MAC address. Or there were things I notice I had forgotten so had to redo the round of 15 netbooks. The only thing I still need a better solution for is the naming of the netbooks. I just open of an xterm and do it manually after the image.

We have 2 bread racks with a cisco layer 2 switch on top of one to do the imaging. Normall it is plugged into their network. The imaging solution for the rest of the machines using their servers and their resouses. But for this I had to unplug it since clonezilla has it's own DHCP/tftp servers. And I didn't want one else possibly getting IP address from me.

I still have another 10 batches of around 100. So still plenty to do. And the plan for fixing them in the field is just have a clonezilla live on a few flash drives with the image. So the techs can grab one take it out there and reimage when ever there is a problem.


@TBOne. I had not heard of AutoYAST. Very new to openSuSE but like it so much I'm now dual booting it on my home machine. I scimmed through the link you provided. It looks complicated lol. When I was installing suse on them I saw you could export the config. But does it require downloading the packages from the repositories? The entire imagine process will probably have to be isolated on a single switch not connected to anything else.

@273. Hmm the distro looks good. But the project doesn't seem suited for uhh this project. This is more a stand alone. We put an OS they can use to surf the web until the machine dies and it gets salvaged. But if they decide to do more with linux I will definitely look into that more. It seems like it would be perfect for that.

@trickykid. I will definitely look into that more. I skimmed through the manual PDF and it looks promising but more complicated. But I'm not that happy with clonezilla. So may try it on some of the other batches.

@schneidz. I thought about modifying puppy or DSL and doing something like that. But wouldn't it cause problems with different brands of HDD? Most of them are the same size 160GB. But wouldn't the geometry possible be different or one have a few more cylinders the another. I ran into that problem before with some low level imaging tool. I tried to put down a backup I made on another drive of the same size but it was just a few bytes smaller and it wouldn't work. I know dd still still put it on there and only complain after it is done. But would the MBR be corrupt? Or the FS?

But if that does work. I would prefer doing that than using clonezilla live.

@Head_on_a_Stick. Haha yeah I know a rolling distro is an aweful choice for a large install. But I thought it might work in this situation. Since once everything is setup we would basically wash our hands of them. No updating, no real maintanance, just reimage when they get messed up by the kids. Or toss them in the salvage pile when they have hardware problems since they are out of warranty machine.

the few usb drives/sd cards i used worked well but maybe i just got lucky. one time i remember going from a lost 16 gb drive to a new 32 gb drive. i think i had to use gparted to make the partition bigger (or maybe i just created another empty 16 gb partition -- i dont remember).

before making the image i usually write a big file of 0's to blank out the empty space -- allows the image to compress better:

Considering that codecs on SUSE are not an easy task, I would shy away from it for that one reason. Keep in mind, this is a school, and students need to watch videos, say on Khan Academy. You might be able to get away with it, but it may not be the best option...

For something like this I would probably lean towards Debian. Stable, releases are supported for quite a while, codecs work, and it's not as bloated as SuSE. Arch may work as well. Either something that has longevity or is rolling release.

Also, installing the same exact image to 1000+ machines has a distinct possibility to be chaotic on a network; all the machines will have the same hostname! Good luck troubleshooting something like that. May as well hire 100 people and just install Linux on each one, following a serial code for each machine.

They didn't any video players on there. On the scope of work they gave up for the project they just said they wanted Google Chrome with Flash plugin & Java plugin. Nothing else. So hopefully that one be an issue. One of the techs did have to go and install VLC on all the ones a certain teacher had. But the people in charge say they are going to be more stringent about how the students are allowd to use them. They are suppose to be strictly internet devices. But I should double check with the them see if they want a plugin for handling enbeded videos that are none flash/HTML5.

I liked SuSE because from what I read it works well in an enterprise environment. And 802.1X works out of the box, well with preshared keys. Not sure about machine authentication. Which they may be moving into with the next bond money.

As for the hostnames. I have named them all with unique names according to the naming convention they have in place.
<Three digit school code><room number><Asset tag>. So they will all be unique. But since they are not part of the domain, they can't see them with the AD managment tools. It should still be possible to track them on the network right? Doesn't DHCP server keep a record of the hostnames?

Uhhh....sorry, but that's wrong. You can install the codecs with a single click:
http://opensuse-guide.org/codecs.php

...accept the vendor change, and that's it. From there, clone the image, since it's already got the codecs installed. Even if you manually install the codecs, it's not complicated at all. The single-click codec installation for media formats has been around since 11.x.
Agreed...the MAC address issue has already bitten the OP. However, if I was doing this, I'd write a script to grab the MAC address, and shove it into the network config file, along with modifying the host name and setting up SNMP according to system information, but that's just me.