Ask Slashdot: How Do You Install Ubuntu On 30 Laptops and Keep Them In Sync?

New submitter spadadot writes "I am setting up a new event in France (Open du Web), where between 15 and 30 laptops running Ubuntu Linux will be available. They came with Windows preinstalled and it must stay for other purposes. I'd like to take care of only one of them (resize the hard drive, install Ubuntu, add additional software and apply custom settings) and effortlessly replicate everything to the others including hard drive resizing (unattended installation). After replicating, what should I do if I need to install new software or change some settings without manually repeating the same task on each one of them? Should I look into FAI, iPXE, Clonezilla, OCS Inventory NG? Other configuration management software? I would also like to reset the laptops to the original environment after the event."

Comments

Puppet

[BHearsum]

http://puppetlabs.com/

Re:Puppet

[nahdude812]

Here is the link to Ubuntu's custom install CD article: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/InstallCDCustomization. Create your own custom installer, and use that to image all the laptops.

Configuration management + install server

[halfnerd]

Puppet combined with either Foreman or Cobbler

There are better sites for this question

[Call Me Black Cloud]

One of the Stack Exchange sites would give you better answers, or at least a set of answers without "frist psot". Take a look at http://serverfault.com/ or even http://askubuntu.com/.

Ubuntu Software center sync option

[pllewis]

I've not used it, but Ubuntu 11.10 software center now has a sync option to sync software between computers. https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter#Comparing_and_syncing_installed_software_between_computers

Are they going to be fixed in place?

[Junta]

If so, you may want to consider yanking the drives and iSCSI booting them. I know at least with Fedora and RHEL/CentOS you can do this, I presume Ubuntu can as well. Set root-path in dhcp in accordance with rfc4173 and boot iPXE. From there take any PXE-capable deployment mechanism and you can proceed without removing or resizing the partitions.

If only 30 and you lack the experience in this area, you may elect to hand tweak an autoinstall situation. I'm not sure if you need to be particularly picky about 'cloning'. In MS it's almost mandatory as so much of the value of an install is in third-party applications. In the ubuntu case all the packages you want are likely already in the distro and debian-installer is really all you need.

All this said, Live usb key is probably the easiest thing. Stock Ubuntu probably suffices...

Simplest solution

[RedLeg]

Remove the HDs

Boot from a CD (live CD distro), allow user-owned USB drives for persistent storage.

Optionally, customize the live CD to your needs, installing and removing packages to suit the task.

Red

Why not VMs?

[dugjohnson]

I run VMs (different versions of Linux and Windows) on top of a Windows host all the time. Ubuntu won't have much of a performance hit. You can run them using VMPlayer (I did that for months until I finally upgraded to VMWorkstation) and installing is a two step...install VMPlayer, then copy the VM. Just an idea.