Learn Rocky Linux - Installation & Partitioning (Manual & Automated)

#Introduction

In the previous episode 2, you understood the Rocky Linux architecture — the kernel, userland, systemd, and repository layers. Now it's time to enter the most practical part: installing the operating system itself. Installation is the first gateway to mastering Rocky Linux, and in this episode you will go through it twice: manually with the Anaconda installer, and automatically with Kickstart.

Many sysadmins consider installation a boring formality — "boot the ISO, click next, done". In reality, the decisions made during installation, especially regarding partitioning and disk layout, will determine the system's flexibility for years to come. You don't want to discover in episode 8 that your / partition is too small for the LVM that should have been planned from the start.

#Manual Installation with Anaconda

#Getting to Know Anaconda

Anaconda is the installer used by RHEL and its derivatives, including Rocky Linux. Anaconda supports several interfaces: graphical (the default mode when booting the ISO), text-based (for environments without a GUI), and most importantly — Kickstart, a file-based configuration system that enables fully automated installation.

After your VM or machine boots from the Rocky Linux ISO, choose Install Rocky Linux 10.2 from the GRUB menu. Anaconda will guide you through several configuration screens.

#Software Set Selection

One of the first decisions is choosing the software set (Base Environment), which determines which packages are installed:

For this series, Minimal Install is most recommended. The main reason is simple: the fewer packages installed, the smaller the attack surface, and the easier it is to understand what's running on the system. You can always add packages later with dnf5 in episode 4.

#Root Password and Sudo User

After the disk layout, Anaconda asks you to set the root password and create a regular user. A common beginner mistake is working as root all the time. The correct practice is to use a regular user and elevate privileges with sudo when needed:

usermod -aG wheel arman

The wheel group is the default admin group on Rocky Linux — its members may run commands with sudo. Full details on users and privileges will be covered in episode 6.

#Partition Layout and Boot

#Standard vs LVM vs Btrfs

When you reach the Installation Destination screen, Anaconda offers several partitioning schemes. This choice determines the flexibility of your storage:

• Standard Partition: the simplest scheme, one partition per filesystem. Easy to understand but hard to extend.
• LVM (Logical Volume Manager): an abstraction over partitions that allows combining disks and extending volumes without downtime — the default and most recommended choice for servers.
• Btrfs: a modern filesystem with built-in snapshots and subvolumes.
• Encrypted Volume: disk encryption with LUKS to protect data from physical access.

For production servers, LVM with encryption is the most common combination. You will learn LVM in depth in episode 8.

#Mount Point Layout

A healthy partitioning scheme usually looks like this:

lsblk

Separating /home from / makes reinstalling easier without losing user data. Meanwhile, /boot is deliberately not placed on LVM — the GRUB2 bootloader reads this directory more reliably without an additional abstraction layer.

#GRUB2 Bootloader and Secure Boot

Installation concludes with installing GRUB2 as the bootloader and configuring Secure Boot on UEFI systems. Rocky Linux supports Secure Boot — a mechanism that verifies the signature of the bootloader and kernel before running them, protecting against early-boot attacks.

Verify that the system boots correctly:

systemctl is-system-running

If the output is running, your Rocky Linux system is ready to use. Output like degraded indicates a failed unit — we'll learn to inspect it in episode 7.

#Automated Installation with Kickstart

#The Kickstart Concept

Manual installation is good for understanding the process, but it's not efficient at scale. In companies, servers are installed repeatedly with identical configurations. Kickstart solves this problem: a configuration file containing all the answers you previously typed manually into Anaconda, so installation can run with zero interaction.

A Kickstart file is plain text with easy-to-read directives:

lang en_US.UTF-8
keyboard us
timezone Asia/Jakarta --utc
rootpw --iscrypted $6$HASHED_PASSWORD
user --name=arman --groups=wheel --iscrypted=$6$HASH
zerombr
clearpart --all --initlabel
autopart --type=lvm

ksvalidator /root/rocky.ks
virt-install --location=/iso/Rocky-10.2.iso \
  --extra-args "inst.ks=http://192.168.1.10/rocky.ks"

#Creating a Kickstart from an Existing Installation

The most practical trick: after a manual installation completes, Anaconda saves a Kickstart file recording all your decisions at /root/anaconda-ks.cfg. This file can serve as the starting point for your own Kickstart template.

ls -l /root/anaconda-ks.cfg

Read and modify this file for your needs, validate it with ksvalidator (as in the example above), and you'll have a repeatable, consistent installation — the foundation of large-scale server provisioning.

#Closing

In this episode 3, you went through the Rocky Linux installation end to end: understanding the Anaconda flow, choosing an appropriate software set, setting up root and a sudo user, deciding between standard, LVM, or Btrfs partition layouts with UEFI boot and Secure Boot considerations, and learning how to automate installation with Kickstart.

Key takeaways:

• Anaconda supports three modes: graphical, text, and fully automated Kickstart.
• Choose Minimal Install for a clean server, then add packages with dnf5.
• Create a regular user and use sudo via the wheel group instead of working as root continuously.
• Use LVM for server partition layouts so they're easy to extend in the future.
• /boot is not placed on LVM so the GRUB2 bootloader works reliably, especially on UEFI systems.
• Kickstart (/root/anaconda-ks.cfg) is the path to consistent, repeatable installations.

In the next episode 4, we will discuss package management with DNF5 and RPM — daily commands to install, search for, and update packages, the dnf configuration structure, transaction history and rollback, and package integrity verification with rpm. Your system is standing; now it's time to fill it with software!