In our school lab, we have 20 computers and we want to set up Linux on them. Is it possible to control them (I mean tasks like updating, upgrading and so on) from a central computer?
N.B: Zorin Grid can do the task I want, it is currently in the development phase. Is anything like it available?
Edit: Thanks to all for helping me. As I'm new to Linux and still learning about cli, I was unaware about the usage of ssh. ssh is just an awesome tool for remote access.
Yes that's possible; it's very standard. Actually, the usual Linux way of working makes it easy.
So, first of all, on Linux, all administrative things are usually done using the command line. So, you enter some command to update your computer. Thanks to ssh, you can log in from anywhere to your computer (as long as you know its address), and do that. You don't have to sit in front of it.
As soon as you have more than one computer on which you want to do the same things that way, it's not a good idea to do it manually for every one of your laptops. Instead, you use a simple automation tool to do the same thing on all computers, checking whether everything worked and similar things. There's a great deal of different ways of doing that! I'm not sure why the world needs "Zorin Grid", since so many other tools that do the same already exist.
I personally like ansible. I just have a list of my computers in a text file, and a list of the software I want installed, the settings I want made and the files to be backed up in another text file, and then I tell ansible to go and do that. It will do it, and tell me the results.
ssh? man ssh at the command line, or into google. Yes: (I will not mention specific tools, but here are some suggestions)
You have from the basics ssh to remote login. Then there are parallel ssh tools to let you login to many machines at the same time, and do the same task on each.
There is also remote desktop, ssh+X11, vnc, etc. These don't scale well to multiple machines. (GUI often does not scale to one machine), because of having to repeat the same instructions. However, it may be what you are used to from MS.
cron tell the machines to upgrade at a fixed time: Debian has the auto upgrade package, you just need to install it.
Then more advanced you have configuration management tools. With these you tell it how you want the machines configured, and it does the rest.
Also look at the Linux for schools projects. Penn State high school, has same software for managing student laptops. It can do an install in a few minutes, multiple machines at a time.
csshandtmuxare two I use for running interactive sessions on multiple machines at once