Installing CentOS 4.4 - Short-n-Sweet

LXer Feature: 24-Apr-2007 Don Parris walks you through a basic CentOS 4.4 installation.

Welcome to CentOS 4.4

I have not installed Red Hat or its derivatives in years. I decided to give CentOS 4.4 a spin. I already knew CentOS is known for not changing much. Yet, I still was bowled over when I discovered they are still using a pre-2.0 version of OpenOffice.org. Even so, many swear by its stability, and use it heavily in business environments. Hence, we're assuming a business workstation running CentOS in this scenario. I'll be keeping this one short, sweet, and to the point. With that in mind, let's get started!

Wrestle With An Anaconda

The fairly helpful boot screen offers the initial options. Beware, though, that it's on a timer, and will launch the default installer after about a minute. Go ahead and hit [Enter], if you haven't already. The first step is to test your CD media. You are not required to test the media, but it's a good idea. It will eliminate at least one possibility should things go wrong later, giving you peace of mind, or it will prevent you wasting your time further on a fruitless exercise.

Next, Anaconda takes over the installation process, and brings us to the Introductory screen. Click Next. Now you need to choose your language and keyboard layout:
Language = Select yours, and then click Next
Keyboard layout = Select yours, and then click Next
Now we move to choose the installation environment.

You'll be asked to choose the type of installation:

• Personal desktop
• Workstation (with development tools)
• Server
• Custom

Hard Disks & Bootloaders

As with most distributions, you can choose to partition your hard disks yourself, or let the installer do it using reasonable defaults. Should you choose 'Auto' mode, you'll see options like this:

• Remove all Linux Partitions
• Remove all Partitions
• Keep Current partitions and use available free space
• Select the drive(s) - check the box(es) as appropriate
• Review/Modify Partitions - check the box if you want to do this

The bootloader configuration is pretty nice, allowing users to choose other OSes at install time. We're only concerned here with CentOS, so the default settings should be fine. You may, however, choose to set a password on the bootloader. There is a checkbox to answer whether you want to configure advanced bootloader options. Unless you need to do so, just Click Next.

Configure Networking

Time to configure our network: Choose devices = eth0 (could also be eth1, etc., depending on the number of network cards you have)
Set hostname via DHCP or manually = DHCP ( except for servers needing static IP's)
Set the IP address of your gateway, as well as up to three DNS servers, and Click Next.

Now for the firewall:
Configure firewall? = Yes (unless the box is not connected to the Internet)
Allow SSH/HTTP/FTP/SMTP? = check the boxes for each one you want to allow
Enable SE Linux? = Warn (unless you know what you are doing with SE (Security Enhanced) Linux, you either want this set to Warn or disabled. Warn lets you test SELinux, you can activate it later when you're ready.

Final Pre-Installation Phase

Additional language support? = choose other languages if you want
Time Zone = Choose your time zone
Set root password = root2pass (then confirm)
Package Defaults = You should be able to accept the defaults, but you can choose to customize, thus adding more packages. For now, we'll skip customization.
Begin Installation? = Click Next.
You should see a message informing you that CD's 1-3 (for example) will be needed for the installation. You can choose to continue or reboot. Click Continue. Now the installation begins in earnest, with the installer prompting you to change CDs until the process is complete.

When you first boot into the newly installed system, there remain a few steps before you can login for the first time. You will need to accept the license agreement. CentOS is licensed under the GNU GPL, so this should not be a problem. Next, you will need to configure the monitor. Choose your:

• Monitor model
• Resolution
• color depth

Finally, you will setup the system user, or what I consider to be a 'normal' user - a user other than root.

• Username
• User Full Name
• Password and confirm
• Use Network login? (only if logging in via NIS, LDAP, etc.)