Doing a Linux MASS install.

[Sy Ali]

Colin, how much testing do you have to perform on these boxes?  Memory
testing, drive testing, etc?

Will you be recording all the little variations in each machine?  I.e.
keeping track of what is what and who gets what?

I'd think that any decent distribution would let you boot from it, do
a quick "best guess" repartition and install.. with very little user
interaction and very basic training.  A non-tech could be shown how to
do it.

And if the distribution requires special configuration for the video
card or the like.. dump it and get a real distro.

Lift the box, plug it in, pop in CD1 to do some system testing.
Verify that machine.  Pop in CD2 to boot a decent distro, perform a
trivial install.. move on to the next box.

I don't see how networking or drive cloning could be much easier.

...

Pulling the hard drives out would be fairly annoying compared to just
booting from a CD, even though CD-to-HD can be a bit slow.

...

Networking requires some setup.. the main advantage is you could have
all kinds of cool updates available on a central computer.  What's the
difference in speed for copying files over a network vs from a CD?

...

Also, with a good liveboot distribution, you could boot from it,
repartition the drive and then copy the files over without necessarily
doing an "install" that requires unpacking, configuring or any
thinking.  I know this is what is done with PCLinuxOS.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml