Looks like you're missing some backslashes toward the bottom, so virt-install wouldn't see anything past "os-variant". Here's mine (adding the ttyS0 allows looking at it on the cli with "virsh console" as well): virt-install \ --name=myhost \ --connect qemu:///system \ --disk path=/data/virt/guest$$,size=20,bus=virtio \ --vcpus=2 --ram=1024 \ --graphics vnc,keymap=en-us \ --autostart \ --location=http://example.org/ks/el6/x86_64/ \ -x "console=ttyS0,115200 ks=http://example.org/ks/myhost.cfg" \ --network bridge=br0 \ --os-type=linux \ --os-variant=virtio26