Raskas’ blog

When you initiate a kickstart installation from a bootcd you have to enter something like: linux ks=hd:sda1:/ks.cfg.
This and whatever you enter on the same line can be accessed during the installation. This line is stored in /proc/cmdline.
It is not specific to a kickstart installation, but on every linux system you can find the information entered at the boot prompt in /proc/cmdline.

In a previous post I mentioned how you can mount your usb-drive. As you can see sda1 is hard-coded which isn’t very flexible. This can be done on a different way:

%pre
if grep -iqE "ks=hd:[a-z]{2,3}[0-9]:" /proc/cmdline
then
  DISK=`cat /proc/cmdline | sed 's/.*ks=hd:\(.*\):.*/\1/'`
fi
mkdir -p /tmp/usb-disk-mount/
mount /dev/$DISK /tmp/usb-disk-mount/


There are many things you can do with the line stored in /proc/cmdline.
You can enter a keyword, and with that keyword you can select which files are needed for the installation.
That keyword can also be used to specify a specific option.

The bad thing is that the %pre section is executed in a seperate run. If you set some variables during the %pre section (like $DISK in the above example) they won’t be available for the rest of the script.
The include path of the file must be hard-coded but you can change existing content or generate the complete file during the %pre section.