Good evening
Our high school Physics department has recently been given a pile of EOL Toshiba Tecra A11 laptops that have been redeployed and scrapped from elsewhere in the education service. With budget cuts having decimated our access to IT for classroom teaching we are planning to rebuild as many as we can and since we can't continue to use the original corporate Windows builds we would like to rebuild them around Kubuntu.
As technician I have been given the job of making this happen and the first snag I have hit is that the machines all have a non-standard BIOS that disables any power-on access options of any kind and locks out booting from anything other than the HDD. I had planned to build the first machine by booting from a USB flash drive and then cloning the completed build but that will not be possible.
My only experience of core builds has been from CD/DVD or USB pen drive, never directly from the HDD. If I put the image onto a HDD and install it onto the laptop, will it bootstrap the installation? I have seen that done with some deployments but I know that very much depends on how the individual build and boot is handled.
Additionally, my partitioning application does not support EXT4 and I am limited at present to NTFS or EXT3. Is EXT3 a problem for Kubuntu?
Any insight on any of the above issues would be gratefully received.
Regards, Frazer
Our high school Physics department has recently been given a pile of EOL Toshiba Tecra A11 laptops that have been redeployed and scrapped from elsewhere in the education service. With budget cuts having decimated our access to IT for classroom teaching we are planning to rebuild as many as we can and since we can't continue to use the original corporate Windows builds we would like to rebuild them around Kubuntu.
As technician I have been given the job of making this happen and the first snag I have hit is that the machines all have a non-standard BIOS that disables any power-on access options of any kind and locks out booting from anything other than the HDD. I had planned to build the first machine by booting from a USB flash drive and then cloning the completed build but that will not be possible.
My only experience of core builds has been from CD/DVD or USB pen drive, never directly from the HDD. If I put the image onto a HDD and install it onto the laptop, will it bootstrap the installation? I have seen that done with some deployments but I know that very much depends on how the individual build and boot is handled.
Additionally, my partitioning application does not support EXT4 and I am limited at present to NTFS or EXT3. Is EXT3 a problem for Kubuntu?
Any insight on any of the above issues would be gratefully received.
Regards, Frazer
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