Education Series Part 01: Cent OS 7 – Initial Install and VM Configuration

Oracle VM Virtual Box, I’ve set aside 1 GB of ram, 2 processors, and 15 GB of hard drive space (I have a small internal hard drive).  I also found that attempting to create the virtual disk (.vdi) file on a USB drive proved to be a bad idea.  Making it exceptionally slow, and actually locking up the install and creation of the virtual machine itself.

The operating system as stated is CentOS 7 – 64-bit.

I am doing the Gnome desktop install, and adding the development tools while I am at it.  Other than that, nothing else is getting installed – at least as far as services, and servers.

I am opting to configure all of that stuff manually as I go along.

I allowed it to do automatic partitioning, I will learn to re-size it as I go along, I also did not create a user account.  While I know the risks of running as root, this is only temporary, so that I can manually add myself as  user, and give myself the correct permissions.  I believe that the RHCSA exam will have users and groups on there, therefore I need a refreshing on creating and managing them.

One thing I am pleasantly surprised about is how nice looking the install is.  The last time I had done this was probably through a terminal years and years ago, with the ugly (yet nostalgic) blue, white, red, and black.

CentOS 7 Install

The install took just under 30 minutes to complete.

After the first reboot it asked me again to create a user, I politely declined, and then had me accept the shortest terms and conditions I think I’ve ever seen in my life.  It was maybe two sentences long, sadly I forgot to screen cap it, though I’m sure you do not care.

It then asked if I wanted to use kdump for system crashes.  A lot of the time with error reporting in Linux distros I will turn on or manually submit them (if it occurs more than once) but this time I opted not too, for my own personal learning.

Let’s face it the people at CentOS do not want to read about how badly I screwed up their operating system.

Dammit!  I spoke too soon, after the reboot from turning off kdump, Gnome forced me to create a user account, not letting me just log in as root.  Which means now I will have to tweak GDM to permit me to login as root.  Just because I can…

With CentOS installed, and loaded up, it’s time to dive into the fun stuff!

CentOS 7 – Virtual Box Fresh Install for Education

In order to study, practice, and pass my RHCSA eventually I need to work in a Red Hat environment, and to do this I am going to do it in Cent OS 7, using the ISO labelled as “everything“.

Since I only have one computer at the moment, I am going to set it up as a Virtual Machine using Virtual Box. I’ve used Virtual Box before, and am most familiar with it, besides maybe VMWare, which there is no way I can afford at the moment.

Cent OS aims to be an exact replica of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the only difference is the graphics, since Red Hat’s graphics are all trademarked. I am not going into all of the details here but if you feel the urge to read them you can check out the CentOS wiki, and dig through the information.

For the next few posts I will be focusing on different aspects of the install and the setup of the CentOS virtual server.  I will install it with a GUI (Gnome) because apparently that is what Red Hat has you utilize.  Though for most of it (I imagine) I will be doing every thing from the CLI.

I am not 100% sure of what is on the RHCSA exam, and I cannot afford even the idea of taking classroom or any other type of training, so my goal is to attempt to over-prepare for the exam. Therefore I am sure that I will be configuring (read breaking) things that are above my level.  I plan on setting up and configuring various servers/services over and over again in an attempt to keep it in memory, and also post every thing I do on this blog.  Writing helps you to remember and learn what you’re doing and in this way I hope others may learn a few things as well.

More updates coming once the image finishes downloading and I do the install.