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.
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 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. Erik Winn