Problem statement

Recent developments in the world have pushed a lot of people to do remote work, and students/kids to use remote education systems. There's basically two groups of people now - those who are equipped to do remote, and those who are not for some reason.

Let's focus on a 'new' mode of education for a moment.

During a recent local survey in Poland, teachers and parents in Warsaw alone have estimated a need for 20k+ extra laptops to be available for their kids/students in order for them to be studying at all! There's couple of problems that have been identified:

• suddenly, number of laptops and tablets should equal number of kids in a household, as kids need an IT equipment piece each to attend daily classes
• the cost of this equipment is not trivial, especially with breaking supply chains around, the availability of this equipment may be limited very soon
• even if you grab a new/used piece of equipment, initial setup is hard/not trivial
• it's much harder to get local IT support

While this all was already a problem in a pre-COVID-19 world, it has become a really amplified when this virus stroke us.

In short: people are missing properly setup, cheap gear to continue their education.

The project

So, I have an idea to automate setting up laptops remotely for anyone that have any good x86 piece of gear around. I want to make it possible for everyone to grab a cheap laptop (used, post-leased, or just laying around with broken OS), and give them an option to image and automatically set it up with all necessary components to run MS Teams, Google classroom etc.

The plan

In order to do this, I've imagined followin components needed:

• build a USB stick image to boot the initial installer from
• spawn a customised https://netboot.xyz/ instance on the public internet
• write a piece of PXE end-to-end automatic installer for Linux Mint
• write a simple PDF manual on how to image your own laptop
• create a simple website (Hugo powered?) that describes the idea and the whole process

The end result

Basically, you should be able to grab and 200-300$ post leased laptop, or the one that you have already sitting on a shelf, and install a full OS with needed browsers using a USB stick and an internet connection - without really touching or setting anything up yourself!

Staff needed

In order to complete this, we'll need following profiles of people:

• technical writer/marketing (PDF manual + site contents)
• someone that knows Jekyll/Hugo to create a simple static website
• another SRE/DevOPS - to help me testing/spawning the environments
• testers with their own cheap laptops

Join me!