Chapter 16. Installer and image creation The following chapters contain the most notable changes to installer and image creation between RHEL 8 and RHEL 9. 16.1. Installer Anaconda activates network automatically for interactive installations Anaconda now activates the network automatically when performing interactive installation, without requiring users to manually activate it in the network spoke. This update does not change the installation experience for Kickstart installations and installations using the ip= boot option. New options to Lock root account and Allow root SSH login with password RHEL 9 adds following new options to the root password configuration screen: Lock root account : To lock the root access to the machine. Allow root SSH login with password : To enable password-based SSH root logins. During Kickstart installations, you can enable root access via SSH with password by using the --allow-ssh option of the rootpw Kickstart command. For more information, see rootpw (required) . Licensing, system, and user setting configuration screens have been disabled post standard installation Previously, RHEL users configured Licensing, System (Subscription manager), and User Settings prior to gnome-initial-setup and login screens. Starting with RHEL 9, the initial setup screens have been disabled by default to improve user experience. If you must run the initial setup for user creation or license display, install the following packages based on the requirements. To install initial setup packages: To enable initial setup after the reboot of the system. Reboot the system to view initial setup. For Kickstart installations, add initial-setup-gui to the packages section and enable the initial-setup service. The rhsm command for machine provisioning through Kickstart for Satellite is now available The rhsm command replaces the %post scripts for machine provisioning on RHEL 9. The rhsm command helps with all provisioning tasks such as registering the system, attaching RHEL subscriptions, and installing from a Satellite instance. New Kickstart command - timesource The new timesource Kickstart command is optional and it helps to set NTP, NTS servers, and NTP pools that provide time data. It also helps to control enabling or disabling the NTP services on the system. The --ntpservers option from the timezone command has been deprecated and has been replaced with this new command. Support for Anaconda boot arguments without inst. prefix is no longer available Anaconda boot arguments without the inst. prefix have been deprecated since RHEL 7. Support for these boot arguments has been removed in RHEL 9. To continue using these options, use the inst. prefix For example, to force the installation program to run in the text mode instead of the graphical mode, use the following option: Removed Kickstart commands and options The following Kickstart commands and options have been removed from RHEL 9. Using them in Kickstart files causes an error. device deviceprobe dmraid install - use the subcommands or methods directly as commands multipath bootloader --upgrade ignoredisk --interactive partition --active harddrive --biospart autostep Where only specific options and values are listed, the base command and its other options are still available and not removed. Removed boot options The following boot options have been removed from Red Hat Enterprise Linux: inst.zram RHEL 9 does not support the zram service. See the zram-generator(8) man page for more information. inst.singlelang The single language mode is not supported on RHEL 9. inst.loglevel The log level is always set to debug. 16.2. Image creation RHEL 9.5 introduces the following enhancements over the versions: Support to additional Edge image type creation RHEL image builder now supports building RHEL for Edge for AWS edge-ami and Vmware VSphere edge-vsphere . Disk image partition table unification Disk images created by using the RHEL image builder tool, such as qcow2 , ami , vhd , vsphere , and gce , now have a separate boot with 1 GiB of space. Filesystem customization policy changes in image builder The following policy changes are in place when using the RHEL image builder filesystem customization in blueprints: You can set the mountpoint and minimum partition minsize entries in the blueprint. The following image types do not support filesystem customizations: image-installer edge-installer edge-simplified-installer The following image types do not create partitioned operating systems images. edge-commit edge-container tar container Customizing the filesystem of such images has no result. The blueprint now supports the mountpoint customization for the tpm directory and its sub-directories. RHEL image builder supports creating customized files and directories in the /etc directory With the new`[[customizations.files]]` and the [[customizations.directories]] blueprint customizations, you can create customized files and directories in the /etc image directory. Currently, these customizations are only available in the /etc directory. You can use the customizations for all available image types, except image types that deploy OSTree commits, such as: edge-raw-image edge-installer edge-simplified-installer .vhd images built with RHEL image builder now have support for 64-bit ARM You can now build .vhd images using image builder and upload them to the Microsoft Azure cloud. RHEL image builder supports customized file system partitions on LVM With support for customized file system partitions on LVM, if you add any file system customization to your system, the file systems are converted to an LVM partition. RHEL image builder now supports file system configuration As of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0, Image Builder provides support for users to specify a custom filesystem configuration in blueprints to create images with a specific disk layout, instead of using the default layout configuration. RHEL image builder can create bootable ISO Installer images You can use RHEL image builder GUI and CLI to create bootable ISO Installer images. These images consist of a tar file that contains a root file system which you can use to install directly to a bare-metal server. Support to additional Edge image type creation Starting with 9.4, RHEL image builder supports OpenSCAP customizations in the blueprint by adding a tailoring file for scap security profile. You can add customized tailoring options for a profile to the osbuild-composer blueprint customizations by using the following options: selected for the list of rules that you want to add. unselected for the list of rules that you want to remove. When you build an image from the blueprint customized with tailoring file for scap security profile, it creates a tailoring file with a new tailoring profile ID and saves it to the image as /usr/share/xml/osbuild-oscap-tailoring/tailoring.xml . The new profile ID will have _osbuild_tailoring appended as a suffix to the base profile, for example, xccdf_org.ssgproject.content_profile_cis_osbuild_tailoring , if you use the cis base profile. AWS EC2 images now support both BIOS and UEFI boot This update extends the AWS EC2 AMD or Intel 64-bit architecture .ami images created by RHEL image builder to support UEFI boot, in addition to the legacy BIOS boot. Support to build VMware VSphere (OVA) RHEL image builder can build VMware VSphere Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) files that you can deploy more easily to VMware vSphere by using the vSphere GUI client. A new and improved way to create blueprints and images in the RHEL image builder web console With the new unified version of the image builder tool, you can much more easily create blueprints and images. Notable enhancements include the following: You can now use all the customizations previously supported only on the command line, such as kernel, file system, firewall, locale, and other customizations, in the image builder web console. You can import, export, and save blueprints in the .JSON or .TOML format. Ability to create images with support to different partitioning modes With RHEL image builder, you can build VMware VSphere Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) files. You can deploy such files to VMware vSphere by using the vSphere GUI client . Filesystem customization policy changes in image builder The following policy changes are in place when using the RHEL image builder filesystem customization in blueprints: You can set the mountpoint and minimum partition minsize entries in the blueprint. The following image types do not support filesystem customizations: image-installer edge-installer edge-simplified-installer The following image types do not create partitioned operating systems images. edge-commit edge-container tar container Customizing the filesystem of such images has no result. The blueprint now supports the mountpoint customization for the tpm directory and its sub-directories. RHEL image builder supports creating customized files and directories in the /etc directory With the new`[[customizations.files]]` and the [[customizations.directories]] blueprint customizations, you can create customized files and directories in the /etc image directory. Currently, these customizations are only available in the /etc directory. You can use the customizations for all available image types, except image types that deploy OSTree commits, such as: edge-raw-image edge-installer edge-simplified-installer .vhd images built with RHEL image builder now have support for 64-bit ARM You can now build .vhd images using image builder and upload them to the Microsoft Azure cloud. RHEL image builder supports customized file system partitions on LVM With support for customized file system partitions on LVM, if you add any file system customization to your system, the file systems are converted to an LVM partition. RHEL image builder now supports file system configuration As of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.0, Image Builder provides support for users to specify a custom filesystem configuration in blueprints to create images with a specific disk layout, instead of using the default layout configuration. RHEL image builder can create bootable ISO Installer images You can use image uilder GUI and CLI to create bootable ISO Installer images. These images consist of a tar file that contains a root file system which you can use to install directly to a bare-metal server.

Commands:
dnf install initial-setup initial-setup-gui
systemctl enable initial-setup
firstboot --enable %packages @^graphical-server-environment initial-setup-gui %end
inst.text