On Mon, Dec 25, 2000 at 12:15:50AM -0800, Erik Winn wrote: > Hi Folks, > > I have just started working with a group here in Portland that is taking in > old machines and recycling them - putting linux on as the OS (of course ;}). > See http://www.freegeek.org for more. Its a non-profit all volunteer thing; > and actually one of the people has posted to one of these lists before ... > but, apparently things kinda (lamely, IMO) drifted toward a mandrake system > -- I think I can turn that around with a little help; I am putting in some > good time there and I think that when the realities of maintaining and > upgrading rpm systems hits they may change their minds. Cool... we've got an established organisation doing this in Australia now: http://www.computerbank.org.au We're using Debian for all of our systems. > > Here is the first obstacle - not really a big one, but I spent all day > digging around and couldn't really find any tools for this one: we want to be > able to clone the machines easily over the local net. Mandrake has a tricky > boot floppy that asks only for the eth0 config and then runs a bunch of perl > to do the rest of the install non-interactively. I haven't started reading > the scripts yet (that's plan B), instead I was hoping that someone had come > up with something similar for debian. We are looking at hundreds of boxes > already and its really just begun. This was extremely difficult for us at first, simply because the hardware we got was so variable that no "standard install" was really possible. There was one small shipment of machines with identical disks which we cloned using dd :). Things have got much better lately, since we started receiving corporate donations of largeish groups of modern PCs with similar hardware. The way we've ended up doing it is this: * A debian mirror server * Customised task packages So we start a normal debian install, but then pick task-computerbank-whatever and it's done. A custom task package might play really well with an automated installer, if your hardware is sufficiently uniform to support one. > > This is really not a huge task - it would just make a nice splash over here > if we could come up with something ... > > I would greatly appreciate recieving help/ideas/advice on this - Note > however that I am not actually subscribed to the list at present (sorry, just > too much at the moment ) so you can reply to me personally if you like. > > Thanks very much in advance! I hope we can get this to happen. > Good luck with your project. Take a look at Computerbank, and if the goals are close enough, perhaps we should start considering international affiliations (Computerbank has several chapters in different cities, and we've found that this has certainly been to our advantage - international links would be even better). -- |> |= -+- |= |> | |- | |- |\ Peter Eckersley (pde@cs.mu.oz.au) http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pde for techno-leftie inspiration, take a look at http://www.computerbank.org.au/
Attachment:
pgpfCMW5UXdhZ.pgp
Description: PGP signature