Thanks for the feedback. My conclusion is, that I'm going to look into a few variants of solutions, one main track being ready-made VMs of my favourite installation, the other being Debian FAI. ... I'm pretty sure I'm sticking with Debian for this task, so FAI is probably the way to go. I will look into Puppet aswell, although I'm not sure yet if it's usefull for speeding initial installation and setup of individual systems.

I wasn't aware of the Turnkey Linux stuff, so thanks for that tip aswell.

I also understand the notion that setup and configuration is bascially our job as devs and IT experts, nevertheless, I suspected that the strong presence of LAMP might have brought about something ready-made that speeds up the task a little. ... I'll start rolling my own solution and perhaps put it online some day for others to use. ... Scratch your own itch, they say, don't they?

Once again, thanks for the feedback.

Searched for the link again, found it this time ... ... ...

The last time I had that sort of a chill run down my spine was in that one short shot in "The Ring" - were you see the girls face. ... That was a *long* time ago. No, I don't watch horror movies.

Summary of the videoclip:
The pilot is chaged in a well built cage, as if on display for this exact purpose. It's smack in the center of a court among combat ruins. Roughly 10-20 soldiers standing around in a Mad Max aestetic setting, some further up on open floors of what looks like a half-bombed building. With very clean and neat combat gear, resembling a solid desert-spotty-camo US armed forces ripp-off. ... Very well funded indeed. Or they all "dressed up for the occasion". Probably a bit of both.

You hear the cheasy allah sing-sang whawha pop chanting we've heard so much of lately build up as the clips soundtrack and see composited videosnippets and "news-bulletin" effects flying about. ... Don't know if that was Fox or not ... wouldn't be suprised if it was the video makers though, because:

What instantly strikes the viewer - me and anybody else I bet - is that the video is *very* well made. No shaky-cam stuff, but what appears to be corrected and composited top-quality HD footage, perhaps even 2 or 4HD. Cut together in a sort of MTV-videoclip aestetic, with extra room for the camera man to move about. A cut-up of closeups putting the victim front-and-center, to allow the viewer to get close to im and build a relation ... very smart. Think "Britains go talent" style personal engagement. The whole video is a barrage of quotes on western news/reality TV and action movie style quotes. ... These guys have done their homework and their message is for us, no two ways about it.

He's wearing clothing that pretty much resembles the orange/red clothes we see on all those Guantanamo pictures. Mmmmh, could this be a little "wave with the telegraph mast" as we say in Germany? ... I wonder. Anyway, the clothes are wet, obviously from the inflamable liquid they sprayed on him. He's pretty calm, standing in the center of the cage. Note: We're still seeing all this in a montage of shots in MTV/reality TV aestetic.

They show a shot of him praying, then a fighter in desert ski-mask (all of them have one) lighting a wooden torch and holding it to a stip of flammble. Bad guy action movie style it very much is. Intended, I bet ... After a few moments the man starts burning, waving his arms in pain, then flailing and running to and fro in the cage bumping into the bars, completely engulfed in flames. He goes down and unconscious after about 10-20 seconds. Couldn't really say exactly, it seemed like an eternity, and I sure as hell have no intention watching that again.

They give it another 10-20 seconds with a close-up to his face/head crisping in the fire - he's not feeling it anymore.
We do the same thing with dead animals on the barbeque, so if you think me putting it that way is cruel, think about your eating habbits.

They stop the fire and bury him with a wheel-loader dumping a load of debris and dirt onto the cage, crushing it, extinguishing the fire and burrying him all at once. The wheel loader is filmed with what looks like a seperate cam, shots change throughout the action. The whole procedure from start to finish looks very well rehearsed

Conclusion:

This stuff has happened throughout history. We know it.
What's new is that anybody - that includes the scariest of religious fanatics - can take a high end cam for a few bucks from a convenience store and make this sort of video of it.

My judgment is out:
These guys are serious. Not Nazi Germany serious - praise the heavens not - but like 14th century serious. Curely, fanatic and not to be reasoned with. A few more of these videos and I'd vote for two dozens of Neutron grenades to be deployed to turn every inch of their territory into even more of a wasteland. ... This reminds me of the exile Germans who decisively spoke out *against* peace with Nazi Germany - their reasoning was to once and for all eliminate every last bit of fascism in Germany, and not stop an inch short of that. Right now, after seeing this, I'd vote for pretty much the same thing with the Isis folks. Bomb them to chunky kibbles and don't let a single one get away is my word of the night after seeing this. ... I will calm down again, I know, but right now that's my call.

This definitly put a dent in my weekend. But now I once again know what humans are capable of.

My 2 cents.

In software development, especially server-side web development this is called continuous integration (CI for short). I have nothing against it, if automated testing, instant rollback and other things are in place. And if the distro has solid quality control and feature management. ... Somehow I doubt that though.

If a distro crew knows what they are doing, I'd trust them with rolling releases. ... Maybe I should try this Arch Linux thing out. Any experiences? Any advice?

This *is* a suprise. I knew MS would learn the lesson eventually. Probably to late, but eventually. That they are this serious about it actually honestly suprises me.
It still is to late, IMHO. FOSS toolchains, especially those web-centric ones, are deeply entrenched with developers already. And those teams deliver software and solutions orders of magnitude cheaper than anything MS has to offer - even if they runtime tech is now all FOSS.

But, who knows? MS might just become the FOSS services company Linuxcare alway wanted to be. They've should've started 10 years ago. If they make a few more smart moves they'll be in the limelight again.

My 2 cents.

If you're well and broadly educated, teaching your child at home - if it is allowed - isn't the worst option, especially if the public schools available suck.

Sidenote: In Germany, homeschooling is illegal - the reasoning being, that children should be introduced to society and a broader perspective, even if advantages it migh have by being homeschooled are mitigated. It's also a mechanism to prevent fanatics, like religious ones, from raising children with a one-dimensional perspective. While prohibing homeschooling if the child does regular exams to prove its level of education is debatable, there is some reasoning behind this.

That said, maybe you can do a mix: Find likeminded parents and found a mini-school. Your children get the special treatment *and* a broader perspective on things aswell. 10 Families willing to pitch together and a few parents willing to participate can work wonders. You get small classes with the special care and attention and the social interaction all in one box. I remember my days in a private school with 16 students in the class. It was awesome.

If that's not an option, homeschooling done well can be a very good thing. School itself can be hell. I know regular school would have been for me. ... But I also know my father probably would've sucked at homeschooling, so it can be a bit of a tradeoff. ... What does your child say?

There is only one kind of systematic prejudice in today's institutions. And it is against white males. And if you happen to be heterosexual too, no one will target you for any favoritism.

Oh, come on! Cry me a river.

Look at any movie in the west - the hero is a white heterosexual man 99% of the time. Look at most any culture and men are heroes and lead in every important aspect of society, super-models aside. Of course, in all these cultures there are also more dropouts on the male side, but that's how evolution wired the sexes as we know today.

Women get aided in MINT, come out of school an avarage of 2 or more gradelevels better than boys (every since) and yet it's still men who get the higher salary and end up in boss positions.
Why?
Because we (men), evolution and our culture wired us to not give a shit about grades and some dumb-ass teacher! Because we know better, don't we? But we *are* wired to seriously give a shit how much we get for our work. Especially so if we want to impress the ladies. A man is way likely would rather be a bum or at least a dropout than work under circumstances he considers below him. I know I am. He is also way more likely to grab a Kalashnikow and take what he thinks he deserves when pushed far enough. Examples all around. All the time.

Get it into your head: The most successful men don't even need a degree. It's white male college dropouts who've built the most powerful companies in the world.

Women end up having to weigh their desire to habe children against optimised career moves. In a classic society they are way less likely to completely drop out of society and also way less likely to rise to the top.

In my opinion any law that tries to curb those tendencies of gender inequality is welcome. That some of them are debatable, mostly because they are as ineffective as they are unfair, is obivous. But your statement is a blatant over-simpification and, to be honest, a tad whiney. If I may say so.

Get a grip, grow a pair and find a cute lady to have some awesome sex with - you sound like you could use some.

MS gained critical mass as the PC market boomed - that's the only reason they are around. Until a few years ago they were also able to help hardware vendors sell new stuff by deliberately turning each new OS into a performance hog, helping vendors justify selling new stuff. Vendors in turn helping MS push their new OS because of reasons.
That aside, MS is mostly known for stifling innovation rather than bringing it on. The odd kinect or something aside.

Apple on the other hand always did well when the control-freak Steve Jobs was in charge. Say what you want, but the man knew what he was doing. His analysis of the market and his reflection on end-user computing in general were and still are fun and enlighting to listen to. Apple never, or very rarely, wastes your time with broad-strokes and/or half-assed bullshit. When they make a statement on their position or product line and why they have it that way it's usually spot on. With Gates and Balmer it is either boring or bullshit.

Steve Jobs was personally interested in building computers that don't suck. He truly wanted devices that he would use every day. His tantrums when someone delivered crap were feared and his persistance in pushing his people to better output was legendary. MS compared to Apple is like American cars compared to German cars. The German cars where all driven by the CEOs of the companies that built them themselves - in motor city each boss had a chauffeur. Ferdinand Porsche would notice instantly if a product he had was shit - because he used them every day. Crysler? Not so much. Look at Detroit today, and you know where that attitude lead them.

As much as I dislike a company having so much power, Apple deserves to be on top. They've turned tech-stuff into fashion and can ask 800$ for a new iPad from the next guy (and girl!) on the street. I won't fall for it - my Lenovo Yoga 2 is way better in every aspect and cost less than half - but most people will.

How MS can even remain in the market that strong is beyond me. Subscriptions for an Office Package? An OS? You've got to be kidding me! ... I personally expect MS to be squished a little in the next few years, if not crushed. Apple from the high end, Google+Huawei+Xaomi etc. from the low end. No, no, sorry folks, my bet is on Google and the fruit crew and MS losing ground is long overdue IMHO.

I bought an HTC Flyer about a year after it came out. I like my HTC phone, I liked the design of the tablet and its enclousure is still one of the best ever built. I mostly wanted to fiddle with it and programm a little for Android.

Turns out that I used it every day, for real work and leisure on the go. Calendar, docs, portable hotspot, reading, watching movies or short videolectures on the go, listening to music, audiobook, taking notes, playing games, etc. I'm since convinced of the feasibility of tablet computing.

I've recently decommisioned the HTC Flyer after more than 3 years of every-day full-scale use and bought myself a 10" Lenovo Yoga 2 Android with LTE module. Awesome device. Good enclosure, 9600milliamp battery, cost less than half of the inferiour iPad Air 2. It runs for 3+ days without charging and I plan to use it as my primary mobile computing device. Will carry my MacBook Air around less because of this I suspect.

As a result I'm using my 4,5 year old HTC Phone even less, which in turn means its battery runs even longer. On top of that, you can use the Yogas battery to charge your phone - that's a feature they (Ashton Kutcher) actually advertised on the Yogas first presentation.

There are pretty decent web IDEs and PHP environments for android out there.

My 2 cents.

Would a vertical maglev be feasible? ... It would be worth a try. ... However, I guess a handful of buildings becoming to high for our current tried and trusted elevator technology is a luxury problem.

Spartan! Kraken! ... Gotta love those codenames. You get a pretty good impression of what kind of movies the crew at microsoft has been watching lately. :-)

Wasn't that the other programming language whos users would look down on us Basic programmers? My good friend from school was one of those. Now he's a teacher and I'm a software developer.

Pretty much sums it up, doesn't it?

OK, jokes aside: Seriously, who cares how a PL is "rated" - whatever that's supposed to mean. How much it's used and how it gets the job done, or, more precisely, how much do I get paid for using it is what counts.
Example: I love Python. I'm measurably more productive in Python. But I do PHP at work. Why? Wordpress and Typo3 are built with PHP. Python only has Plone and that has almost no market here in Germany.

Its that simple.

And to be honest, there are many neat exotic programming languages out there - all of which I would love to have the time to look into, but don't. Pascal definitely isn't on that list.

My advice to anyone today would be to let go of Pascal and however it is "rated" and learn some other flash exotic language - perhaps one of those countless new ones that run on the Java VM (Scala, Closure, etc.), no?

My 2 cents.

Seriously guys, this is fucking outrageous! I' writing my first post on my brand new tablet just a minute ago and you're abysmaly flaky mobile version double posts again. So it wasn't android 3.2 after all.

And why can't I turnoff ads in the mobile version?

Rob, what's going on? .... You guys need to get your shit together man - it's 2015, mobile web is standard now. Get with the effing programm. ... Do you need help?n

Perhaps you need help? I'll build a professional mobile version for credit alone.

(Please don't mod down - this needs attention folks. Seriously.)

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux.
Really, it's that easy.

Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways than one, but it's worth a try - and it does look really cool. Seriously.
Suse and Redhat are hassle-free to install aswell. All three are definitly more hassle-free than any Windows installation you can do thesse days.

I've got Ubuntu 14.04 on my ThinkPad. And while it can be anoying (which OS isn't?), it is way ahead of Windows in usability and you can get tons of books and free info on the web for it.

Other than that I'd recommend Mac OS X or Chrome OS - but since you already have your laptop I guess that's ruled out.

Welcome to the camp. Enjoy.

Need to run special software tied to the OS? No? ... Install Linux. Ubuntu can be a drag, in more ways the one, but it's worth a try. Suse and Redhat probably are hassle free aswell. All three are way easyer to install than a fresh Windows.