I run an organisation that cleans data from donated laptops and reinstalls minimal operating systems and office for poor schools in rural India.
I plan to boot and wipe the laptops I receive, but I don't know what to do after that to install Ubuntu. Which release/variant/version should I burn onto CD/DVD?
In terms of software, would like to install at least OpenOffice on the laptops.
Well now, this is a very good question. I assume that the laptops will be of a low spec because they are second hand, so I would suggest current versions of Lubuntu or Xubuntu.
It is worth, however, trying out all the versions to see which people respond to the best.
These should all come with Libre Office installed by default.
As you mention schools as recipients of the laptop, Edubuntu would be the logical choice, unless performance of your hardware is a real concern. In the latter case, you might look at the Ubuntu derivatives. Ubuntulite could then be an option (or Lubuntu if you want to stay with a "recognised flavor")
As an additional thought: Edubuntu 12.04 is an LTS release, i.e. being supported for 5 years, while Lubuntu is only supported for 18 months (and therefore needs dist-upgrading ("heavy maintenance") earlier than Edubuntu!)
Hopefully you will receive hundreds of used laptops for your project. Erasing and installing Ubuntu will however then mean a lot of time consuming work until you can give away the laptops again. Therefore we need to keep the steps involved reliable, and as fast as possible.
For one simple but important reason I would rather suggest you go for standard Ubuntu rather than for the somewhat less popular variants Lubuntu, Xubuntu, or Edubuntu: people in rural areas will somewhat more likely get help for the mainstream Ubuntu than for the other variants. Only if you have many very old machines that can't even run Unity2D you may consider one of the more lightweight distribution variants.
download the installation CD
make a bootable USB drive from that (installation is faster than from CD)
alternatively user Remastersys from a running and updated installation to clone to the other machines.
Boot with this USB drive (you may need to adapt the BIOS for that)
Choose Try out Ubuntu on the welcome screen to start a live session
Wipe data on the drives with any of the following in a root terminal
dd if=/dev/zero of=/sdx # for low security or when disks were encrypted
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/sdx # for a more secure wiping
replace /sdx with the appropriate for the hard drive(s), take care to not wipe your USB drive. For other secure wiping tools see this question.
close the terminal and choose "Install Ubuntu" from the same live session
Remove the USB and reboot when done
Update the system (optionally you may also install proprietary graphics drivers now)
By going through the above step of a live session before installing we have the advantage to see that the laptops are healthy, and we can also verify their hardware is capablae of running Ubuntu.
I will suggest Xubuntu , and you can Download the package LibreOffice from here for Common Manual Installation.
Since you will be using Lower Specs Laptop ( Used one) Xubuntu will be better choice or , Other alternate way would be Making a Custom Live CD so that you can include all the packages required basically for Education of Minors. You can browse the Edubuntu Apps and add them if found interesting for that age group .
This way you can include Libreoffice and other things specifically , and remove other things not needed in Xubuntu. This way you can actually distribute these custom ISO and get help in making it available quickly through all your Laptops.
