I'm deploying a few hundred laptops next year. I want them to be dual boot machines, and have the windows side of things worked out using sysprep. For the second OS I want to use Ubuntu, but am uncertain how best to configure this. I can load a disk-image easily onto the disk, but when it boots, how would I best give the machine a unique name, generate the user (or join to the AD)? What are the tools/resources Ubuntu/Linux uses for this?
EDIT: I should have added: the disks will be cloned using ghost. After this, the machines will not be connected to a wired network - they will be completely wireless. I guess I could potentially pxe install linux after the ghost clone, but it would be quicker and easier just to do one imaging run. Any suggestions? I'm conjuring up some first-boot type scripts, but was wondering if there were any enterprise solutions.
As ubuntu is debian based, you should be able to use FAI for installation.
A PXE deployment server where the configuration file is generated by a web script. The web server can pick up the IP address of the machine, or the DHCP server can add a query string or path info to the URL for the configuration file.
At least, that's how I'd do it if I knew any of the details with regards to Ubuntu.
EDIT:
Regarding imaging, there's no reason you couldn't handle that the same way. Simply load a small image via PXE that will copy the full image to the hard drive and then make the necessary modifications to the configuration.
If you download Ubuntu alternative install version, you choose a option o says "Install on OEM machine" or something which allows you to configure the machine one time ( as the user problem simply set the user to be seted (when the machine first starts the user sets the user ) and set a FAI script, this is the same a using a FAI sripts for itself, but is just easier to set.