Perform an Inception. Mount your iso, then mount the image found inside. Go inside the second image to see what is available during the pre install section of a kickstart. Use isomaster to rebuild the install.img and plop that inside the the outer iso, rebuilding that one too.

In almost all high level languages you can do something similar to x++ to increment an integer counter. Bash doesn’t have an incrementer, but you can still make your own integer counter using back-ticks and expr.

The pre-install is not inside a chroot environment, so whatever variables you set or export are only available for use outside of a chroot. And that’s the problem with the post install section, by default anyway.

ImageMagick falls short here. You can convert between the different pixel formats, and you can convert a vector file to a bitmap type, but it doesn’t convert pixels to vectors. Inkscape can convert pixmap to vectors. There’s also an online tool called Vector Magic.

Record the installation time and date, install files into the system, record installation date and time, find file overlays and installation scripts on a remote file system. You can do a lot with the post installation routine in a kickstart file.

With the power of rsync, it’s quite easy to accidentally erase, overwrite, or otherwise destroy your data with one slip of the keys. Even if you supply the right switches, you might leave off a slash or put one where it doesn’t belong.

This will work for Windows and Mac. Linux has many options to do this and it’s even easier to do so I won’t even bother covering Linux for once.

Most Linux distributions today boot to a graphical desktop environment by default. Whether that desktop environment is KDE, GNOME, Xfce, or one of the more obscure offerings, that choice is up to you. You can mix and match from different terminals too. The exceptions to this rule would be forensics distributions and a barebones secure installation that would either have a desktop environment but choose not to load it or it might not be installed at all.

You can list the contents of an rpm without installing it first. If you’re not going to build your own from source, you should at least check an rpm before installing it to see what it’s going to install.

If you’re running an older distribution of Linux or you just find that the kernel module is unavailable because your RealTek RTL series PCI-Express Ethernet card is just too new, then you’ll need to install the driver manually.