Managing and applying custom updates to multiple identical machines

I work at a library where we have just recently setup 5 kiosk's based on linuxmint. The hardware is identical. I actually used DD to make an image after I set the first one up. My Problem is, I now need to apply more updates to these machines. I'm making several updates to things like grub, and other system configuration. As well as a specific users .gconf folder. Apply such updates as removing keybinding's. Updating power the power settings. I have ssh access to all of the boxes. What would be the best way to update these? I first apply the changes to our experimental machine. How would you recommend then pushing these updates out to all the other kiosks? ---- Just discovered http://www.puppetlabs.com/ This looks promising. Any other ideas? Can this be ran as a daemon or will I have to goto each kiosk, login as root, and run puppet? Running scp and rsync to transfer .gconf and other changes has failed for me. I have no root user, obviously because of the way ubuntu runs. So no way to get it to escalate to root for the transfer of modified files. At least that I know of.