I've installed CentOS in a QEMU VM for some gcc-compiling work. I've used Gentoo for years, but am a newbie at CentOS. During install, I selected "development" options, which pulled in more than I really need. I don't want or need a heavy desktop environment chewing up part of the 4 gigs allocated to the VM, but I will occasionally need a GUI. What I'd like to do is remove GDM, Gnome DE, Java, Ruby, and a bunch of other stuff. Then install ICEWM. I want to remove GDM, but keep X, so that the machine comes up at the text command line. If/when I need a GUI, I'll type "startx", after setting up ~/.xinitrc.

So far, I've made one change to yum.conf, by adding remove_leaf_only=1

I think that my next 2 steps should be to execute... init 3 yum groupremove gnome-desktop

Then what? "yum search icewm" does not find anything, and I may still have GDM trying to log me in to a non-existant GNOME. What do I do next?

By the way, at startup, I notice a message quickly flash by like... "intel_rapl: no valid rapl domains". What's it about?