Mike’s RHEL/CentOS 5 Installation

October 26th, 2008 by Mike | Posted in Linux |

Here is a quick guide to minimize RHEL/CentOS.

For those of you who don’t know, RHEL is one of two major players in the enterprise linux market ( the other being novell’s SUSE Linux ). It has been around forever and is always great to have knowledge on… It also costs a metric shitload. CentOS solved our problem! They took RHEL and build their own identical linux distro for free, which is legit due to RHELs open source licensing

This article is not overly in depth, but is enough to get an install off the ground with a small CPU and disk footprint. Anyway, let’s get to it.

First, perform an almost default install. The only section you need to modify is the software installation.

To install only the bare essentials, uncheck any and all software to be installed. This involves unchecking the Gnome desktop option, then choosing to customize software install, and unchecking every option under each software group.

RHEL/CentOS will then override your no-install option with only the bare essentials required to have a working system.

When your install is complete, you can get a list of all running services by issuing:

# chkconfig –list|grep \:on

I then disable a pile of services with the following script/command.

Many of these will fail as if you do a minimal software installation, many of these packages won’t exist. If you do a default install, all of these will exist.

# for service in acpid apmd auditd atd autofs bluetooth cpuspeed cups firstboot hidd gpm ip6tables iptables isdn kudzu mcstrans mdmonitor messagebus netfs nfslock pcscd portmap restorecond rpcgssd rpcidmapd sendmail smartd yum-updatesd; do \

chkconfig $service off; \

service $service stop; \

done

Add RPMforge to open up a pile more software options

# wget http://packages.sw.be/rpmforge-release/rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm
# rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.3.6-1.el5.rf.i386.rpm

Remove unused/unwanted packages

# yum -y remove selinux*

Install any updates.

# yum update

Please note that this is a document in progress, but currently it gives you a stable, incredibly well known/supported, and flexible linux installation. ( and free if you use CentOS )

With the steps above, your installation size should be just under 550MB while including YUM for easy installation of the myriad of software out there for RHEL/CentOS.

Enjoy.

http://www.centos.org/

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/