Sent: Monday, February 26, 2018 at 4:13 PM
From: "M. J. Everitt" <m.j.everitt@xxxxxxx>
To: list@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [LUG] Persistent USB (sorry, no sublect in last message)
On 26/02/18 15:16, mr meowski wrote:
> On 26/02/18 09:06, aaron moore wrote:
>> Hi Lug
>> Well, I am now the proud owner of 5 reconditioned Dell lap tops and
>> intend to dual boot them with Ubuntu. Am I right in thinking that if I
>> work up a persistent usb start up thumb drive and load it with all my
>> favourite softwares i will then be able to install Ubuntu plus
>> favourites in one go? Any advice on this gratefully received.
>> Kind rgards
> Cool, what did you get in the end?
>
> What exactly are you trying to accomplish here though - an automated
> installation (you want kickstart for that), a pre-built customised image
> with an answer file (you want pre-seed for that) or 100% identical
> software+configs dumped onto every machine (you want to clone a small
> finished image to each machine for that, and then adjust the partitions
> to fit afterwards)?
>
> Or as you're setting up a mini lab/classroom sort of scenario do you
> want to get the laptops all setup perfectly as "class laptops #1 through
> #5" and then lock 'em down so you can restore them to exactly the same
> state after every session? (you'll want a client/server architecture for
> that, probably with a boot server and NFS mounts). There are equivalents
> to the Windows "deepfreeze" management software to lock down and manage
> Linux systems so naughty little users can't muck anything up too much.
>
> The one thing I'm reasonably sure of is that your Dells have come with
> OEM Windows licenses/software on them that you understandably don't want
> to wipe and lose but you'd prefer them to run Ubuntu. Obviously you
> don't fancy doing the same near-identical manual install on all 5 of
> them one after the other either, hence automation time.
>
> Explain exactly what your end goal is and everything will be much clearer...
>
> Cheers
+1
The plan is to set up a small digital training studio, with about 4 or 5 participants at a time. I want to dual boot the laptops with Ubuntu and install software like inkscape, librecad, freecad, sheetcam, blender, and others, plus a number of plugins/extensions, and obviously I don't want to have to do it 5 times. Also, it will probaly change over time and it would be good to keep them all the same.
At the moment I have a basic owncloud set up where all job files are shared to all computers. I am sure there are better ways of doing this but it works for me. Not sure about 'locking them down'. Why would it be necessary?
I'm not good at code, I could probaly manage a simple scrip, but would prefer a nice gui!
Hope that gives a better picture.
Thanks
