Kickstart

In Linux you have a great way to install a computer without being at the computer to answer all of the questions. With the program called Kickstart you make the installation decisions ahead of time and store the answers to the installations questions in a file called ks.cfg. There is a GUI program called ksconfig that you can use to create this ks.cfg file. When you have this file you can put it on a boot disk created with the dd command. All you need to do is get a boot image from the images/ directory on the Red Hat Linux cdrom. To put the image on a floppy run this command:

bash# dd if=bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0

There are other images, but the bootnet.img gives you the ability to do network installations. Next copy the kickstart file onto the disk:

bash# mount /dev/fd0 /mnt/floppy/
bash# cp ks.cfg /mnt/floppy/
bash# umount /mnt/floppy/

With this done you can reboot the machine. At the boot: prompt you can type:

boot: linux ks=floppy

Kickstart should take over the installation and only ask questions that are not answered in the kickstart file.