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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 imag

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?

benplumley 3y ago
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.
- chongli 3y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  None of these K-12 schools or teachers are going to pay for 30+ USB drives for students.
- presbyterian 3y ago
  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.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  > You get usable laptops [citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?
soco 3y ago
Maybe with a configuration management tool like Spacewalk? https://spacewalkproject.github.io/ https://spacewalkproject.github.io/
- redundantly 3y ago
  Spacewalk was discontinued 3 years ago and was only for fedora/rhel/centos based systems. https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki
  - soco 3y ago
    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/ https://www.uyuni-project.org/
toast0 3y ago
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.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  There seem to be a fair number of sellers on ebay that perform this task on out of support chromebooks and then sell them.
- LargeTomato 3y ago
  Step 1: find a contractor

benplumley 3y ago

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.

chongli 3y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management
wildrhythms 3y ago
None of these K-12 schools or teachers are going to pay for 30+ USB drives for students.
presbyterian 3y ago
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.
NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
> You get usable laptops [citation needed]; how many bricks can you expect from having middle-schoolers monkey around with low-level firmware stuff?

soco 3y ago

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

redundantly 3y ago
Spacewalk was discontinued 3 years ago and was only for fedora/rhel/centos based systems. https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki
- soco 3y ago
  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/ https://www.uyuni-project.org/

toast0 3y ago

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.

yomlica8 3y ago
There seem to be a fair number of sellers on ebay that perform this task on out of support chromebooks and then sell them.
LargeTomato 3y ago
Step 1: find a contractor