Deploying Chromium OS to Multiple machines with PXE

[hsd3...@gmail.com]

Our school has about 300 Dell Minis that we want to install Chromium OS onto.  I would like to be able to do this in a dedicated lab over a network.  Is this possible, and if so how do I go about it?

I have already tested the Dell build from a USB drive and it works great, except for the touch pad, but I have hundreds of mice I can use if I cant get the touch pad working.

Thanks for any help.

John Schiman

[Greg]

How are you imaging the machines at the moment? Do you really need to setup a lab with network booting. I find that using 4 USB keys, I can't keep up with the computers (average 3-4 minutes per device). 

If you still want to network boot the machines, here's a suggestion, based on how I've imaged  netbooks, using both USB keys and network booting. 

Started with gparted, which can be booted off a usb key or from Network / PXE
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livepxe.php

I extracted the filesystem.squashfs file and replaced their init scripts with my own version. I ended up creating a simple menu system to build and deploy images to the netbooks. 

When I was using the system to deploy linux (which had only a single ext3 partition), I had the gparted image mount a cifs drive and use partimage (http://www.partimage.org) to deploy to the system. 

Now, I'm imaging ChromeOS and with all the partitions, I find it easier to just clone the entire drive with dd ( http://www.linuxweblog.com/dd-image ). The issue that I have with using dd, is that all information is copied and the image file can become quite large if you are not careful. To avoid this, I've always zeroed the drive before building an image. The other issue with using dd is that you have to make sure that all the computers have the same size drive (or larger)

[david...@staff.craven.k12.nc.us]

Could you provide more detail on your process? I have cobbler with preseeds set up currently to do automated installs of Ubuntu, but I have not been able to model this with Chromium. I've also attempted using FOG to deploy over PxE, but there's something strange in the way it multicasts (namely it doesn't, it seems to revert to unicast regardless of settings).

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