When I'm doing an installation, I select the installation from CD/DVD option for CentOS, but then I don't know how to specify that it should use an anaconda-ks.cfg file that is either on a USB key (or on a Samba network share).

How could I install using the installation DVD, as well as a kickstart file that would specify which packages to enable and other installation settings?

Not sure that you can use either Samba or USB. There has to be some limit on the drivers included in the boot code. Your choices are floppy, CD/DVD, hard drive with ext filesystem, NFS, or HTTP.

So if I could somehow make my ks.cfg file available over HTTP, how could I go about selecting it in the DVD installation process? (I've installed it a few times recently and haven't come across the place to select the location to the kickstart file.)

Have a look at this post in my blog here: Shameless plug

If you have an apache server lying around, give it a script named ks.cgi and put it in the cgi-bin directory. ks.cgi must be an executable which prints the ks.cfg lines to stdout. Then on the boot command line it would be something like this:

You will want to have the command cdrom to tell it to install rpms from CD/DVD.

So what's happening is:
1. the linux boot line does an HTTP GET command to the Apache server
2. Apache runs /cgi-bin/ks.cgi
3. ks.cgi prints the kickstart lines to the output
4. Apache takes CGI output and returns it verbatim to the client
5. Linux gets the output and runs it locally

You can simply place the ks.cfg file on the /var/www/html/ directory and then append ks=http://yourservername/ks.cfg on the installer. No need to create a script. (The file will need to be world readable)

...for one thing I am using a USB stick to install Fedora (Cinnamon). The computer boots up and starts the installation program on the USB stick (are we already in Anaconda?).

My networking system on the target machine is still not alive at this point. I put together enough of a webserver on a different machine to serve up anaconda.ks on demand, but when I used the flash stick to boot up in the first machine, and pressed the [Tab] key for the command line, I put in the suggested "linux ks=http://10.0.0.118/cgi-bin/ks.cgi" nothing worked. I kept getting a kernel panic and some message about not doing this with a live system. Well so much for kickstart!

I knew I was missing something somewhere, and that's that kickstart isn't for individual machines that you sit at to install. It's for big, dead networkis of machines., God knows how they do it.

Yours in shame,

BryGuy