I’m currently investigating how Skolelinux (or Debian-Edu which is the same) could provide means for custom network configurations. What I mean by this is, that the Skolelinux installer could query the network server for a list of packages or some configuration files to install on every newly installed client in the network. This would greatly simplify customizing the network for us at the Diego Thomson.
A few examples of the customizations I’m thinking of:
- GNOME instead of KDE
- Different sources.list, so the APT packages would automatically be fetched from our file server (which would run apt-proxy for example)
- Putting a few important applications on the Desktop by default (though this would probably rather be done on the server using /etc/skel)
An inquiry on the debian-edu mailinglist seems to indicate, that such a solution is not yet integrated. So I'm now looking at solutions. I discovered Cfengine yesterday. It's already installed by default on Skolelinux clients, and is already used during setup. So I guess it would be possible to pull some Cfengine files from the server and execute them during installing.
I'm currently in the process of building a custom ISO image. Then I can test some installer modifications to find a sensible solutions.