Kickstart Help

[bobb]

torsten hath declared on Thursday the 03 day of July 2003  :-:
> Hello All,
> 
> RedHat 9.0, headless node
> 
> I'm  working   on  a  bootable-CD-ROM  (NFS-mounted   distro)  kickstart
> installation method.  When the computer boots, it give me the
> 	boot:
> prompt, and waits.  I havae to type in
> 	linux ks=cdrom:/ks.cfg
> to get it going.  Is there any way to make this automatic?

I have done this with a bootnet floppy on the 7.x series a number of times.
mount the bootnet.img on a loopback ``mount -o loop bootnet.img /mnt''
then edit /mnt/syslinux.cfg and added:

	label ksfloppy
	  kernel vmlinuz
	  append "ks=floppy" initrd=initrd.img lang= lowres devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=8192

Then set "ksfloppy" to the default with:

	default ksfloppy

We generally get the ks.cfg over nfs which might be handier if your going to 
be booting from cdrom, with something like the following:

	label ksnfs
	   kernel vmlinuz
	   append "ks=nfs:11.22.33.44:/kickstart/7.3/" initrd=initrd.img lang=lowres devfs=nomount ramdisk_size=8192

(Installing a machine with the IP 4.3.2.1 will then look for the file 
"/kickstart/7.3/4.3.2.1-kickstart" on the nfs server, we just use symlinks).

Then umount /mnt and dd the image to floppy.

I presume you could do something similar by mounting the ISO 
and editing /mnt/isolinux/isolinux.cfg, although I have never tried it.

> During the  install, it  gets through to  aspell-ca-somevesrsion package
> and stops, saying it is corrupt.  I haven't checked if it is corrupt, or
> even exists, because I only copied one CD-ROM (disc1).  How do I control
> which packages are  installed 

Under the "%packages" section of the ks.cfg you can specify either package
collections "Software Developement" or individual packages "gcc" to be
installed. A snippit from our ks.cfg for 7.3 workstation installs looks like:

%packages --resolvedeps
@Classic X Window System
@GNOME
@Software Development
	[...etc...]
ntp
vim-enhanced
vim-X11 
xemacs
gv
	[...etc...]


> (since only a bare minimum  are needed, as this is a headless node)?

Getting the package list setup is a little bit of trial and error,
but you get there in the end :)

HTH,

- bobb

-- 
Robert "bobb" Crosbie.
Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing,
O'Reilly Institute,Trinity College Dublin.
Tel: +353 1 608 3725
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