Previously it would do a groupinstall of Base, which results in a total of 300 packages. This is the same amount of packages when it is installed from cd and minimal install is checked.
But this minimal install includes way to much and useless packages like pcmcia, irda, isdn, …
The groupinstall of Core gives a better result. Now only a bit more than 100 packages are installed. Even yum or openssh aren’t installed. So you will have to add some extra packages but at least you’re not stuck with all those unused packages and running services.

The same happens when you kickstart. By default it will install the base and core groups. But again this results in 300 packages. Just mentioning core or not mentioning base in the packages section doesn’t solve the problem.
Luckily there is an, undocumented, option for the packages section. You can pass –nobase if you don’t want to install the complete Base group. But now you will have to mention the Core group or it will install not enough packages.
This is how your packages section in the kickstart file can look like:

% packages --nobase
@ Core
yum
openssh-clients
openssh-server


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.

Today I was testing the %include command but every file and every path I tried gave me a file not found error.
It appears that just the specific kickstart config file is copied to /tmp and the other content of my usb-disk is nowhere to find. This explains why my included files can’t be found.

The solution is to make your included files available during the %pre-section. This is possible because anaconda will parse the ks.cfg file 2 times. The first time it won’t complain about included files that can’t be found and only the %pre section is executed. The second time it will complain if an include file is missing.

This is how I made my includes work:
* mount the usb-drive during the %pre section

%pre
mkdir -p /tmp/usb-disk-mount/
mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/usb-disk-mount/

* include the files

%include /tmp/usb-disk-mount/partition/base
%include /tmp/usb-disk-mount/network/dummy