This article is a collection of techniques that may interest people who want to do more with Kickstart. It covers Kickstart customization, scalability, and security.
Advanced Linux Installations and Upgrades with Kickstart
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Eugenia Loli
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I you want to see an even more advanced usage of kickstart, check out NPACI Rocks, a cluster distro developed from RHEL.
http://www.rocksclusters.org/Rocks/
They use a series of XML files to build the kickstart file dynamically, which is queried over http by anaconda. They also like the idea of just reinstalling nodes instead of trying to keep differences up to date.
I used it for quite a while in the last cluster I built and was pretty pleased. It was easy to add new packages and make very detailed kickstart files. My host computer was too slow (PII 350) to generate the kickstart file dynamically, but it was pretty easy to generate a set of static files and serve those instead.
So what is the verdict on the least MB installation using kickstart, more exact what is the minimum set of packages that have to be installed in order to get the system up and going. Kickstart file prefered. I know there was a thread in the RH mailing list dealing with this problem, but I think it fizzled out right when fedora came out. (500MB for base installation is a bit obscene).
And here was me thinking someone had ported the Amiga boot thingy to Linux. IIRC, the name Kickstart has long been trademarked for that.
Yes, my first association was also Amiga kickstart. But better stop this thread now, since it’s OT here
Hmm, don’t have a specific answer for you, but I do have a way you can find out. I don’t have the hardware or time to confirm this, so you’ll have to do it yourself.
First, make a minimal install using the normal installation procedure. Use your personal definition for “minimal”.
Second, open up /root/ks.cfg, which is written by the install process.
Third, edit that file to take out packages that you don’t want. This could mean breaking some RPM dependancies (which I found are not checked using the Anaconda installer).
Finally, reinstall using the kickstart file.
Alternatively, before you reinstall, you can remove all of the packages manually to ensure the system will be stable when reinstalling.