I am using cobbler to install Kali using help from here for the kickstart. The iso being imported by cobbler is the netboot mini.iso from here.
I am testing this on a VM before moving to actual physical machines.
After some initial hiccups, I am able to PXE boot and bring the VM up to the login prompt but there are a few issues
(a) There is no graphical interfaces and dpkg -l does not show gdm3 to be installed
(b) apt-get install of gdm3 (after update, upgrade) does install a graphical interface - but - there are no menu items to access the various applications in the kali distro. dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 does not help either.
No gdm3 errors were seen in /var/log/syslog (or /var/log/installer/syslog).
What puzzles me is that when I used the mini.iso directly as a CD (with virt-manager, no PXE boot), gdm3 installs with all the menu items showing the different apps.
UPDATE 1:
Did a manual install from ISO and then compared the dpkg-get-selections (with CD install vs netboot) and the missing item in the kickstart might be the item
d-i tasksel/first multiselect Debian desktop environment, ... GNOME, SSH server, standard system utilities
Shall update if that fixes the issue.
UPDATE 2:
Solved!
The d-i tasksel line in the kickstart was the key in getting the graphical desktop installed during pxe.
