On 25/08/05, Craig White <craigwhite@azapple.com> wrote:

On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 11:14 -0400, John Hinton wrote:
> Tom Brown wrote:
>
> > Hi
> >
> > Installed my first CentOS box last night after coming from Whitebox -
> > This is perhaps me being stupid but on install i opted for 'Custom'
> > install as i prefer minimal and then build as i suit. I went through
> > the list of things to install and removed everything apart from
> > networking. Install happenned and tons of stull ended up being
> > installed including X openoffice and the like - Why was that when i
> > de-selected everything apart from networking? It was very much
> > bloatware and not what i want on a server.
> >
> > thanks for any hints
> > _______________________________________________
>
> First, this is RedHat's direction, not something specific to CentOS
> (just cloning you know).
>
> This has been my complaint with RedHat products for some time now (about
> rh 7.3 or so). CentOS is simply following that system. One of the things
> that's really hard to get rid of are the graphical interfaces.... RH
> manage this... RH manage that, which seems to make X-fonts install, but
> I'm not sure if this is all. You can turn them off in one place and then
> find them in set to install in at least one other situation. Got to turn
> them off all over the place. An install of el4 versions seems to force
> X, whether you want it or not, in spite of unchecking X.
>
> I hate to say it, but it reminds me of Winders! Bloatware... Yeah! More
> is better philosophy. I liked the rh 7.2 installation, where you
> selected your packages, it did a dependancies check, provided a list of
> what was going to be installed and the ability to go back and not
> install whatever it was that was forcing the other depends aps, or to
> accept those dependancies and go forward with the install. A great,
> although perhaps a bit techinical installation process. I suppose this
> is the price we pay for attempts at positioning the OS to the
> mainstream. It needs the more automated methods, but I'm still a bit
> upset that 'Custom Install' doesn't work like it used to and seems to
> get worse with each new release.
>
> I'm not so bothered by disk space as I am by more ways for intrusion.
> It's just more crap to keep updated... and stuff that never gets used. I
> do subscribe to the school of thought that it is best to stay within the
> official RPMs and enjoy the beauties of yum or up2date. That has been
> pretty darned reliable and greatly simplifies administation over
> multiple machines. I really don't enjoy removing packages after the
> install as it's pretty easy to break something doing that as well (and I
> love these things that are broken that you don't find out about for 3
> weeks, meanwhile... who knows what might be lost).
>
> So, OK... yeah, you hit on one of my nerves with what RH has done... but
> I'll live with it, but my 'score' for their OS gets reduced on this
> front as well.
>
> -----
> Score reductions for RH: (not to be confused with score reductions for
> CentOS. CentOS get A+++ on all fronts)
>
> They weren't happy with my money for running up2date from their servers
> but wanted more, stating they were going to give me support time. I
> don't want support time, so I'm here. I wouldn't have minded more money,
> but not that much more!
>
> RHEL should have an upgrade path from one version to the next. I can
> understand (barely) the lack of this ability from rh 9 to rhel, but from
> el3 to el4? Yeah, so maybe I'd need to fix 50 config files, but that's
> better than moving hundreds of hosting clients and the thousands of
> configs for them. I am certain doing this would be an extremely complex
> issue for RH.
>
> Bloatware... and each release gets just a bit worse and is generally gui
> related. We don't want no stinkin' GUIs on servers!
>
> A general degradation in the quality of updates. I had exactly one issue
> with updates from rh 5.2 through rh 7.2. I've lost count during my rhel
> time... still not a lot, but at least 3 or 4.
>
> The ability to legally run a 'test' machine fully updated without cost
> went away. I used to 'buy' rh off the shelf. A bit more monetary support
> for rh and most came with a free subscription. I would run a 'test'
> machine with this subscription and feel more secure with going live with
> new updates to the real world machines or simply to use it as a
> 'learning tool' without breaking somebody's stuff.
> ------
>
> Still not quite enough to make me jump over to Debian... not while
> CentOS is alive. But I think Debian has gained a lot of good people,
> translated into more knowledge/more time and efforts/better packages due
> to RedHat's change.
----
John - you are rambling

RHEL 4 / CentOS 4 installs a very light package set (and no X) if you
simply choose server. I think that there was mention of a special server
CD iso for installing a super light set and that it was working with
text install but not the GUI install. See the archives from a few weeks
ago - something like Server CD. I didn't even know one had existed.

You do have to be careful when you add stuff because some things will
cause a bunch of stuff to be installed as dependencies.

Craig

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