Originally published on LinkedIn on 2025-12-22.
An Article about Rubenshof - Linux Mint Unattended Installer
Every year we set up some devices for our students at school. This year we had the situation of delayed deliveries, because a donation of notebooks took longer than expected. So we have to get faster with setting the devices up. I took this challenge and created a unattended Workstation setup for our school.
At the weekend I did some research of already existing projects, I started to learn how they work.
FAI project is a very interesting project, and by analysis how it works I also learned about Linux ISO’s images and how they are built. For our school project I was looking for a different solution. So I decided to started to development based on the project from Antonio Carlinis. I knew a bit about unattended installations, because I already had experience with kickstart under RHEL and preseeding Ubuntu installations in automated PXE boot environments.
So the goal was to take a USB Stick and boot from it. The installer should do everything else. It took a weekend to create something which we already can use. The Rubenshof - Linux Mint Unattended Installerwas the outcome.
There is still work in progress and a lot of improvements can be made. But it already make our lives a lot easier when the printer drivers are prepared, Firefox policies are rolled out and the tools for the Univention Domain Join are set up. After 10 Minutes the scholars workstation is in a state where they can login with their users managed by UCS and access the internal Nextcloud Web Interface. Also my final enemy (the printer) is happy and does it’s job.
Happy to use Open Source because Free and Open Source software makes this possible. Many thanks to community and companies who believe in Open Source, and hope I can give a little bit back with this project.