Fedora 19 Custom Bootable DVD

I'm a stickler for the scripted installs. They're quick to produce provided you have a package list, and just as quick at installation as a LiveDVD.
The majority of web sites these days talk about create a Live distribution, which is close to performing a ghost of your system as you have to build it first and then use tools to create the DVD image for burning.

Even before PXE I was an avid fan of network installations (Solaris Jumpstart and IBM NIM on AIX).  When PXE arrived and Linux was able to perform the same thing I was over the moon.  The fact that you could take an equivalent (some mods) PXE style install and apply it to a DVD image with modifications to the isolinux.cfg file this made making automated DVD builds really easy, especially for one company that asked me to partly help modify their ability to build custom DVD images to build Fedora boxes.  This was easy on FC14 and matched closely the values in a pxelinux.cfg file.

Fedora 19 on the other hand needed some extra work since GRUB2 and a complete change to the attributes requires in the isolinux.cfg file.  However, having set down and hacked about with the isolinux.cfg file I can safely say that you can still build a scripted install of Fedora without having to use all those excess tools and without having to install an OS first.

The kickstart files remain unchanged in their answers (or so I've found so far).

To make the isolinux.cfg file recognise your script file you need to do the following;

1. Copy the DVD contents to a folder
2. Create your kickstart at the top level of the DVD rom directory structure
3. In the isolinux directory edit the isolinux.cfg file

The file I created had the following content;
default install

label install
  kernel vmlinuz
  append load_ramdisk=1 ramdisk_size=9216 initrd=initrd.img network ks=cdrom::/myInstall.ks inst.repo=cdrom inst.text

This will perform a text based installation rather than a GUI one.  The key change really to all this is that the ks argument requrires the device containing the kickstart file and between the : : either blank as above (no spaces) for the system to find the cdrom device, or the full path of the device, e.g. /dev/sr0.  The next change is the inst.repo which in this case is telling the boot loader that the install packages are on the cdrom and that it should be mounted.  Finally instead of just typing text we now have to type inst.text to perform a non-GUI installation.

Once isolinux is changed you can create an iso image of the directory structure and then burn to disk.

All the relevant arguments to the append line can be found at http://wwoods.fedorapeople.org/doc/boot-options.html#_inst_stage2