What goes in the image?

I’m pushing the elementary school image out today to about 120 OS X laptops.  I used to do this with a firewire drive on each freaking laptop.  We bought a mac mini and installed OS X server on it.  Now I can use OS X system imaging tools, and push the image out to all the laptops over a local network.  I should finish all 120 laptops today. 

So, in the interest of helping me remember for next year, and sharing my default image settings:

1. Latest version of OS X - patched up
2. Norton Anti Virus - setup for mount scans and latest virus definitions
3. Firefox
4. Flash and shockwave installed and tested for safari and firefox
5. Inspiration
6. Timeliner
7. Sharing preferences setup for Remote Desktop
8. All printers installed and tested
9. All shared resources (fileservers) loaded and bookmarked
10. Disable damned dashboard
11. Office (don’t install messenger) - patched up
12. VLC
13. Google earth
14. All browsers should have homepage changed and favorites added
15. flip4mac
16. Mavis Beacon Teaches Touch Typing
17. Smartboard drivers and Notebook - updated and patched
18. Configure student account - open all applications to make sure they work
19. Put common application in the dock
20. Disable bluetooth and adjust power-savings features in laptops

...I’m sure I’m forgetting some things, but that is about what my image looks like this year!

On 12 August 2009, Bill Van Loo inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

I’m in the same exact process right now myself; getting our 2009-2010 Mac OS X 10.5 image created. I had been planning on doing the Firewire target mode thing again this year to do our imaging, but we do have OS X Server up & running (also on a Mac Mini, as it happens).

Can you talk a little about your process for imaging via network? I’m at the point where I’ve almost got one machine configured as the master image. From here, I’d normally use NetRestore Helper to make the image, then use NetRestore to image each machine. How is the process different using OS X Server?

On 12 August 2009, Bill Van Loo inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Oh, and also: a few additions to your list based on what I’ve loaded on our image:

TuxPaint
TuxTyping
TuxDraw
Google SketchUp
Scratch 1.4 (new version looks amazing - support for Lego WeDo motors & sensors!)
GIMP
Flickr Uploadr
iWork (at $250 for a 500-seat license this is a no-brainer for us since we don’t use MS Office)
NeoOffice (for those who really prefer Office-style interface & better compatibility with Office docs)

On 12 August 2009, Bill Van Loo inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

Erm, that should be “TuxMath”, not “TuxDraw” (no such thing as “TuxDraw”)

On 23 April 2010, robert inscribed the following thoughts about this post:

I can use OS X system imaging tools, and push the image out to all the laptops over a local network. Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a proprietary protocol developed by Microsoft, which concerns providing a user with a graphical interface to another computer.