On Fri, October 5, 2012 10:43, Phil Dobbin wrote:

m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

...

Nux! wrote:

...

On 05.10.2012 14:31, Nux! wrote:

...

On 05.10.2012 14:05, James B. Byrne wrote:

...

So what is it that I am missing? What other step is required to get my 'normal' gnome desktop with the utilities ans such displayed in the title bar?

Try: yum groupinstall "Desktop" "Desktop Platform" "General Purpose Desktop"

Btw, you can't really have "minimal" AND "gnome" ... :-)

<snip> Yeah... they keep changing the group names, for no good reason AFAIK. For example, between 5 and 6, they changed KDE from "KDE (K Desktop Environment)" to "KDE Desktop". Note that we groupinstall "X Window System" and Desktop, and *then* the KDE; I'd assume gnome was the same.

   mark, confirmed gnome disliker (and hater of gnome 3)

If I require a minimal desktop in CentOS 6, I usually use the net install ISO & when the time comes, just select 'minimal desktop' & there's a small(ish) gnome desktop installed but without all the major cruft.

Granted this minimal desktop does include Firefox but then again, if I want a desktop environment, I usually want Firefox.

yum groupinstall "Desktop" "Desktop Platform" "General Purpose Desktop"

appears to have worked. As I had already installed two of these I infer that the missing bit was "Desktop Platform". Is there a purpose served by making the process of installing the gnome-desktop so opaque? Not that it matters much to me for I am likely to be switching to kde once Redhat embraces Gnome3. But it does seem needlessly convoluted. I thought that the whole purpose of groupinstall was to avoid this sort of peek-a-boo package selection.

Anyway, it is installed and working. This is a temporary arrangement as I intend to remove the desktop components from the kvm host OS once I am finished.

There is one 'gotcha' however. When I installed the three of these packages NetworkManager got turned on. This evidently overrode the NM_CONTROLLED=NO configuration in the ifcfg files.

This is not a good thing when you have eth0 linked to a bridge and you have a dhcp server somewhere on your lan. I ended up with br0 having one IP and eth0 having another, which had, shall we say, interesting effects on connectivity.

Thank you for the help. I am very much afraid that I would never have sorted this out on my own.