First off, decide which LiveCD YOU want to support as an installed system. Pick one that will work on the bare minimum, lowest machine CPU and RAM of the group. If one PC is lower than all the rest, give them Damn Small or Puppy and all the rest something else, realizing that you now must support two distros. Of the ones that fit that criteria, which have installers, and which will give a decent user experience.

Say you decide that you want to go the *ubuntu route, look over some existing install docs found on the Internet, then edit for your audience. It is likely that this group knows nothing about firewalls or routers or even which box is the cable/DSL modem. I have experienced this with VPN users at work that have never had an ISP, much less broadband Internet in their home. Also, keep in mind that they are not going to understand ANY lingo or jargon from the computer or linux world. You will need to replace or define all jargon words in the install doc. If the document you work from doesn't have any info about working from LiveCD, then you will need to add to it.

Good Luck, Brian K.

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From: Oren Beck Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2008 6:21 AM

The reasons for this situation are several at more than one location.

The overview is to remotely install Linux on computers owned by non tool users, zero skills presumed of them.

What I am seeking is several methods for making the process just plain work. Initial customer is my mother in Berkeley, and her social groups may join in. The minimal cold start scene will be a Knoppix or Damn small tested computer and net connection. The defined factors are: DSL or cable modem set up as DHCP. Hardware approx 2000 or newer. Working OS of XP or installed Knoppix or both in most cases. Very Few sites with no OS. Internal HD swaps are a non starter as most of these folks are non tool using mundanes. The rest of the story is they almost all are politically or socially desiring to use Linux by choice! With a few skeptics that "want to be shown" more about the net than Linux as they still use TYPEWRITERS! And they often have little to no computer skills to unlearn. Short of my doing some major frequent flier miles tripping,KCLUG may be their salvation.

"Someone is going to do it- why not us?"

On Jan 23, 2008 6:20 AM, Oren Beck orenbeck@gmail.com wrote:

The reasons for this situation are several at more than one location.

The overview is to remotely install Linux on computers owned by non tool users, zero skills presumed of them.

What I am seeking is several methods for making the process just plain work. Initial customer is my mother in Berkeley, and her social groups may join in. The minimal cold start scene will be a Knoppix or Damn small tested computer and net connection. The defined factors are: DSL or cable modem set up as DHCP. Hardware approx 2000 or newer. Working OS of XP or installed Knoppix or both.in most cases. Very Few sites with no OS. Internal HD swaps are a non starter as most of these folks are non tool using mundanes. The rest of the story is they almost all are politically or socially desiring to use Linux.by choice! With a few skeptics that "want to be shown"-more about the net than Linux as they still use TYPEWRITERS! And they often have little to no computer skills to unlearn. Short of my doing some major frequent flier miles tripping,KCLUG may be their salvation.

LiveCD needs: Base system SSH Client OpenSSHD

I would create individual public/private key pairs for each install. Once the CD is booted it will ask the user to insert CD/Thumb drive/floppy with the needed certs, the certs will be copied to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on localhost so we can remote back. After this it will setup a SSH reverse tunnel:

ssh -R 1100:localhost:22 user@remote.com

This sets up a tunnel on the remote host on port 1100 that will forward to the local SSHD on port 22.

So we are now able to remote install.

Jonathan