[ubuntu-us-mi] Fwd: [GRLUG] How to Custom Image 100 plus laptops

[Robert Citek]

What's the context:  are these machines in a classroom or machines to
be given out?  How fast is fast: 100 machines in a couple of days, a
couple or hours, or a couple of minutes?  What are the capabilities of
the machines: USB2, GigE ethernet, easily removable drives, PXE?

Where I volunteer our method is to clone drives.  That is we install,
customize, and then create an image of the drive.  The image is
created in such a way that it can be cloned onto any type of drive
(SATA, IDE, USB, VM, etc.) and any size.  It takes us under 10 minutes
to clone a drive.  So 100 computers would take 1000 minutes or 17
hours.  But since the process can be done in parallel, you could
create multiple copies of the image and clone many disks at once.

If you had to clone 100+ machines a day, every day, for days on end,
then I'd look into using Clonezilla over a fast network:

http://clonezilla.org/

Good luck and be sure to let us know how things go.

Regards,
- Robert

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 6:05 AM, Ben Rousch <brousch at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've installed Ubuntu a lot, but always single computers from the
> standard ISO. Does anyone have suggestions for doing something on this
> scale?