MX Linux Forum

I volunteer at a charity that reconditions old donated machines, installs Linux on them, and distributes them to people who need them. We install the software by first creating a "golden image" (hand install on a target machine, tweak browser bookmarks, etc.). Then we use Clonezilla to ingest that disk image and then push it to our reconditioned machines. This process has worked well for about 10 years, very smooth and fast.

Of course each donated machine has it's own chipsets for video, audio, wifi, etc. When we were using Mint, it would run the HW autodetect on bootup and load the correct drivers. Under MX that doesn't happen. The MX live USB stick works just fine at HW autodetection. But it appears that the HW autodetect stuff doesn't get installed on the target machine, or at least it doesn't get automatically invoked upon bootup. So if the new machine has different chips, you won't get audio or graphics mode or wifi or whatever when running that golden image that was built on different hardware.

Any advice on how to get this running? I really, really like MX, as it runs well on our older, slower donated machines, has an actively supported 32 bit edition, and a large user community. And it obviously has the HW autodetect stuff built into the live USB stick images, so I just need to know how to find it, install it, and invoke it.

Thanks

If you like: "MX Snapshot" is just for that. Do everything as you like, then run it from Menu, create an iso (your "Golden Image) , write it to a usb with "MX Live Usb Maker" (or Rufus on Windows) then install on all machines.. No matter different specs/hardware/chips .. (Just not 64 bit on 32)

In case you can't see an icon to install: Open a terminal:

Thanks, I'll check it out! I was not aware of "MX Live Usb Maker".

MX Live Usb Maker enables you use the rest of the usb stick and also use persistence features. Also it has "dd" mode option when needed (for other distros etc.) .

Other than that, you can write your iso on "any Linux distro" terminal with dd (or) cp commands, simply.

That sounds even better. From our standard PXE boot to CLI, I already mount the server's disk image folder on the client machine via NFS. Thus I can script a simple dd from that NFS drive to the local disk. That keeps our automation flow intact. (It also includes a HW inventory, written to a database, disk wipe and test with badblocks, then the image writing as the last scripted step).

Thanks again!

Before I forget: When creating the snapshot, choose the "Personal" iso (selected by default) to keep customizations, accounts, passwords etc. Other one will create a generic iso.

Also (as you already know) you can first upgrade to 19.4 (many ways) then do them all ...