Mastodawn

There is a subtle, almost sadistic pleasure in what I’m doing right now: I open boxes of brand-new ThinkCentre PCs, unpack them, hook them up to a monitor, keyboard, and network cable. I boot from USB and replace the preinstalled Windows 11 (never even started) with my Debian 13 golden image, using Clonezilla.

As of today, the setup is based on Debian 13, but I’m already working on a variant based on FreeBSD and jails.

#Linux #FreeBSD #Clonezilla #LiberatingPCs

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passthejoe 2d ago

@[email protected] Thanks for letting us know that you use Clonezilla for the imaging. Do you pull the Debian image from your network, or an external USB drive?

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Stefano Marinelli 2d ago

@passthejoe I've configured one of them, then via sftp copied it into my internal server.

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passthejoe 2d ago

@[email protected] I don't hear a lot about mass provisioning and maintenance of Linux and BSD desktops.

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fedops 💙💛

@passthejoe provisioning: we used to have a PXE boot setup at my former place of ork. Easy enough.

Maintenance: 'dnf install dnf5-plugin-automatic' (or equivalent), set install to "yes", enable timer, done. Most likely via Ansible. At least if you keep an internal repo for your packages, which you totally should.
@stefano