Juan Chacon Free Software and Education Project: Creating a Lubuntu Custom Install Disk for the School Lab

I'm a high school teacher in a lab full of Windows 7 machines, and it's just not

working for me. I'm teaching Web Page Design I, which is a course in HTML and CSS, and by using WinSCP and Notepad++, the Windows workstations are adequate for the task. But for my Computer Science class, where we will be exploring mathematics with Python and will need to install lots of Python libraries and tools, I need Ubuntu. Actually, I'll be using Lubuntu, since it is light weight, supports the same software, and works much better with the old NVIDIA GeForce 200 graphics cards that are in the machines (the Unity desktop wants to make use of the 3D graphics features of the card, which looks awful and crashes with both the free nvidia driver and the proprietary ones from nvidia. Lubuntu is perfectly happy in 2D, and the free driver works very well with it.

The Plan

Create a VirtualBox VM with Lubuntu and all the software I plan to use in the lab installed on it.
Install Remastersys on this VM and use it to create a custom installation disk.
Use the custom installation disk thus created to install Lubuntu along side Windows on the lab workstations.

Step 1: The VM

I created a new VirtualBox VM and installed Lubuntu 14.04 (64 bit) on it. After running all the updates, I did the following:

Installed virtualbox-guest-utils. This package will not be needed on the lab workstations, but without it screen resolution on the VM is limited to 640x480, making it too difficult to work with.
Added this PPA and then installed remastersys-gtk. I figured better to test this early, since if it doesn't work there is not point in doing the rest of the setup.
Installed gnome-screenshot and gimp. I added these two now to be able to take screenshots of the remastersys screens and edit them.
From Synaptic package manager I enabled the "Canonical Partners" repository and installed adobe-flashplugin.
Added the ubuntugis-unstable PPA.

After this I tried using remastersys, since if that doesn't work, there is no point in continuing. I'm glad I did this early in the process, since I encountered a problem after launching System Tools -> Remastersys and selecting dist:

I found an Ubuntu forum post here, which suggested creating an empty lightdm.conf file in /etc/lightdm would fix the problem. It did! The process completed and I found a custom-dist.iso file in the /home/remastersys/remastersys directory. I installed successfully with the custom-dist.iso, with one caveat -- when I tried to select "Encrypt my home folder" during the install, it crashed. Encrypting the home directory does not appear to work with the Remastersys created iso, so I'll just make sure not to select that option, and to use the process described here to encrypt home directories later.

The last thing I needed by way of infrastructure on this VM is Grub Customizer, which will make it easy to edit the bootloader menu to have it boot to Windows by default (it pains me to do that, but I'm sharing the lab this year so I have to play nice ;-)

Step 2: Adding Software

I know I'll continue to add other software as the year goes on and I find other things I need, but for the first go round, here is a list of packages I know I'll want, that I have just installed on the VM:

python3-pip
idle3
python3-matplotlib
python3-sphinx
python3-pep8
python3-bs4
python3-w3lib
python3-scipy
python3-pyqt5
ipython3
ipython3-notebook
python3-termcolor
python3-cairo
python3-paste
python3-cherrypy3
python3-flask
python3-bottle
spyder3
inkscape
gftp
vim
vim-gtk
most
openjdk-7-jdk
sqlite3
spatialite-bin
spatialite-gui
qgis
grass
pgadmin3
postgresql-client

I also installed SymPy, using the command: 'sudo pip3 install sympy', since sympy is not in the package repository. Finally, I installed Google Chrome using the installer from here and Opera using the installer here.

With all this software installed, I ran Remastersys again to make an installation iso disk image. Tomorrow I'll try it out in the lab...