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?

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 _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler

Hi Andrew, Good question ;-) I will use Larry Wall's phrase to answer you: "there is more than one way to do it" :-) Furthermore, IMHO by selecting the desired anaconda mode in the kickstart template, I save effort/time in maintaining our many profiles. With kickstart templating, even for three distros and various profiles, we only need one short master rh.cfg. Sometimes, I do avoid to use cobbler's built-in features. For example, I prefer to use a central logging server for all distros that we use (CentOS, Fedora, SL, Ubuntu) for remote installation logging and monitoring, but AFAIK the anamon cobbler facility only works for Red Hat alike system so far.

[...] The naming convention makes it feasible to use the above Cheetah conditional check. Why didn't you just add the text option to the kernel options line for the profiles if you have the different ones? I'm just curious. Regards, Andrew Regards, -- Zack _______________________________________________ cobbler mailing list cobbler(a)lists.fedorahosted.org https://lists.fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/cobbler