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Comment by duckmysick | Hacker News Reader

I see a lot of comments about replacing the OS with Debian/Ubuntu.

I've been wondering, what's the best practice here? Let's say I have 100 Chromebooks. I imagine there's something better than walking with an USB stick to each of them, one by one. Can I push Ubuntu onto each machine, unattended, and then provision it with students accounts?

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Not sure about all the models, but for the two chromebooks and the chromebox I have, you need to open the case and remove a write protect screw before you can set up standard booting, and then most of the devices don't have a network boot stack either... So, lots of labor.

Open the case, remove the screw.

Boot to chrome os, flash the uefi module and set boot config to use it by default.

Reboot from your usb drive, which hopefully does an unattended install.

If you're fancy, the usb drive could be built so you can remove it after booting... Either load the installer fs as an initrd, or configure the network and then load the installer data from the network.

There seem to be a fair number of sellers on ebay that perform this task on out of support chromebooks and then sell them.

Step 1: find a contractor

It's a school - write or find a comprehensive set of instructions (for the happy path), give each student a chromebook and a blank USB, and have them do it. You get usable laptops and the students learn an important life skill - not necessarily that they memorise the instructions for next time, but that they learn what's possible.

School Chromebooks are centrally managed via MDM software [1]. Getting students to jailbreak and install Linux is a non-starter. Schools lock these devices down right to the hilt. There’s no way parents would put up with their kids having an unrestricted laptop provided by the school.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management

None of these K-12 schools or teachers are going to pay for 30+ USB drives for students.

I used to manage laptops (both student Chromebooks and teacher Windows laptops) at a school, and I wouldn't even trust the teachers to be able to do this, much less students and parents.

> You get usable laptops

[citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?

Maybe with a configuration management tool like Spacewalk? https://spacewalkproject.github.io/

Spacewalk was discontinued 3 years ago and was only for fedora/rhel/centos based systems.

https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki

This is surprising as it was the upstream community project for the still active Red Hat Satellite... oh well. At least there seems te be an active fork called Uyuni https://www.uyuni-project.org/

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