Hi James,

Thanks for responding. My results are below.

> > Now, I understand that very few people would use RHEL
> > as desktops. Fedora? Sure.  But setting the
> > installation always to text mode seems
> > to contradict with the official RHEL 6 Installation Guide.
> >
> > Is there a way to get the documented behavior, i.e. graphical
> > by default, use text mode when desired?
>
> Remove the "text" option from the /etc/cobbler/settings
> file, the line you pointed out in settings.py is the default
> if no setting is found in the config file.

Indeed this is the case. Now what I have is the following:

[root@cobbler ~]# less /etc/cobbler/settings

[...]
# kernel options that should be present in every cobbler installation.
# kernel options can also be applied at the distro/profile/system
# level.
kernel_options:
 ksdevice: bootif
 lang: ' '

# text: ~
[...]

and

[root@cobbler ~]# cobbler system dumpvars --name=nb1 |grep kernel_options
kernel_options : ksdevice=bootif lang=  keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us interface=eth0 locale=en_US kssendmac priority=critical
kernel_options_post : reboot=efi
kernel_options_s390x : {'vnc': '~', 'ip': False, 'RUNKS': 1, 'ramdisk_size': 40000, 'ro': '~', 'root': '/dev/ram0'}

>
> As for the install, it may work in text mode but if you
> install a desktop environment you should get a system booting into
> init 5 instead of init 3.

My tests with CentOS 6.3, Fedora 17, and Scientific Linux 6.3 desktops
have led me to conclude that even for desktop installation, if
it's done in text mode, the runlevel is set to 3 in /etc/inittab
instead of 5.

But, if anaconda runs in the graphical mode (the default according to
RHEL and Fedora's Installation Guides), then the following happens
after the first post-install reboot (assuming 'root' is the only
user initially):

0. The firstboot utility is launched
1. The runlevel is set to 5 in /etc/inittab

This is the "officially" documented behavior and is what I tried to
attain with my PXE network install tests.  I used the following short
Cheetah snippet in my kickstart template to switch anaconda to text
mode for non-desktop installation for all three aforementioned Red
Hat alike distros:

#if not $profile_name.find('-desktop-') > 0
text
#end if

BTW, all my profile is named with this convention:

distro_name-{ph,vm}-{desktop,server}-arch, where ph: physical host;
vm: virtual machine

e.g.

fedora17-ph-desktop-x86_64
fedora17-ph-server-x86_64
centos6-vm-server-x86_64

The naming convention makes it feasible to use the above Cheetah
conditional check.

Regards,

-- Zack

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