Note:If you are using a Red Hat Enterprise 5 (RHEL5) system (or one derived from RHEL5, CentOS for example), system-config-kickstart does allow you to select packages, the packages selection section is disabled. Fedora based systems have this bug fixed.
In the packages section you can select individual packages or groups of packages. To obtain a list of the package groups available in your install, try the following simple python script.
#!/usr/bin/python import yum yb = yum.YumBase() yb.doConfigSetup() yb.doTsSetup() for grp in yb.comps.groups: print "%s (%s)" % (grp.name,grp.groupid)The above script outputs the name of the group followed by the groupid in parenthesis. The groupid must be used in the %packages section. In our example we will be installing a very simple client, we will only add the base and core groups to our kickstart. We will also want puppet and augeas to be installed, so we will add those packages to our list. To specify that packages should not be installed, prepend a - (minus/hyphen) in front of them. Our %packages section.
%packages # groups @base @core # additions augeas ntp puppet ruby-augeas vim-enhanced # subtractions -bluez-gnome -bluez-libs -bluez-utils(We added ntp and vim-enhanced because I like to have my systems keep good time and because I like the syntax highlighting of vim).