Less than minimal

Last week I updated my CentOS base image document.
One important change was in the yum line.

Previously it would do a groupinstall of Base, which results in a total of 300 packages. This is the same amount of packages when it is installed from cd and minimal install is checked.
But this minimal install includes way to much and useless packages like pcmcia, irda, isdn, …
The groupinstall of Core gives a better result. Now only a bit more than 100 packages are installed. Even yum or openssh aren’t installed. So you will have to add some extra packages but at least you’re not stuck with all those unused packages and running services.

The same happens when you kickstart. By default it will install the base and core groups. But again this results in 300 packages. Just mentioning core or not mentioning base in the packages section doesn’t solve the problem.
Luckily there is an, undocumented, option for the packages section. You can pass –nobase if you don’t want to install the complete Base group. But now you will have to mention the Core group or it will install not enough packages.
This is how your packages section in the kickstart file can look like:

% packages --nobase
@ Core
yum
openssh-clients
openssh-server

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 19:01 and is filed under Fedora, Linux SysAdmin, Xen, kickstart. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Comment

  1. tbd » Blog Archive » xen said:
    June 15th, 2008

    [...] this install is that it’s super tiny, only 187 packages get installed. I found a cool tip here which i used in my kickstart file to get this super stripped down [...]