First I want to thank all of you who responded to me both on this list and in the CentOS wiki. Your responses helped greatly!
I want to say that if you are running CentOS 5 and you do not have a overriding reason to go to CentOS 6, stay where you are. It was so much easier installing CentOS 6 on a new machine, migrating is next to impossible.
Here's where I am today: 1. The base DVD install would not allow me to run the gnome desktop at 1920x1080 resolution with the default nVidia driver, the highest resolution I could obtain was 1024x768. However the text screen worked just fine after I introduced the video=1920x1080 in the grub.conf file. 2. When I installed the nVidia closed source drivers, the gnome desktop ran perfectly in the high resolution mode. The text mode then dropped to 1024x768 even though it retained the video=1920x1080 parameter (could it be those blacklist parameters introduced to disable the noveau drivers?). 3. During the installation I instituted software raid-1 along with LVM. It all worked perfectly until I got to the Boot Loader screen and instead of using the default (/dev/sda) I used what I thought would work in a raid-1 environment IF one of the hard drives went bad. I chose to install the boot loader in /dev/md0. Of course it would not boot. I recovered from this by going through the install and choosing to upgrade a existing installation and it allowed me to place the boot loader in /dev/sda. What that leaves me with is a raid-1 environment that works great as long as /dev/sda remains. How do I fix that??? 4. I still need to add all of those extra repositories (adobe; webmin; rpmfusion; etc). 5. I'm still trying to decide if I want a high resolution text screen (that I would use almost everyday) or a high resolution GUI screen (that I'll only use for certain application installs)???
At my 'real' job, we use RHEL and we've done some things using RHEL 6.2 for POC (Proof Of Concept) projects. With a POC, we install using a standard installation DVD (as opposed to using our RH Satellite Server). All of this to say that there are application installation options that really fit the needs of a server installation, you can choose 'Server' and 'Server GUI', which installs the gnome GUI without selecting a desktop environment.. Some things we run require a GUI to install (Oracle DB; IBM DB2 UDB; IBM WebSphere; etc.). How do I select this type of environment using CentOS 6.2? In other words, I'm running CentOS 6.2 x86_64 Desktop
TIA, Gene Poole
+ It's impossible for everything to be true. +
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Gene Poole gene.poole@macys.com wrote:
- During the installation I instituted software raid-1 along with
LVM. It all worked perfectly until I got to the Boot Loader screen and instead of using the default (/dev/sda) I used what I thought would work in a raid-1 environment IF one of the hard drives went bad. I chose to install the boot loader in /dev/md0. Of course it would not boot. I recovered from this by going through the install and choosing to upgrade a existing installation and it allowed me to place the boot loader in /dev/sda. What that leaves me with is a raid-1 environment that works great as long as /dev/sda remains. How do I fix that???
The MBR isn't mirrored, so you just have to install grub on the other drive, usually by executing grub, then: grub> root (hd1,0) grub> setup (hd1) but the numbers depend on how bios sees the alternate drive when the primary dies. It is always a good idea to practice re-installing grub from an install disk booted in rescue mode so you know how to fix things even if you have to move your mirror disk into the primary position to make it boot.
- I'm still trying to decide if I want a high resolution text screen
(that I would use almost everyday) or a high resolution GUI screen (that I'll only use for certain application installs)???
If you sit at the machine, you probably want a high res gui and to do text work in terminal windows. If you don't sit at the machine you probably don't even want X installed for the console. Run freenx for occasional (or even regular) remote GUI access, or use ssh with X forwarding for single GUI applications at a time.
On 5.6.2012 17:15, Les Mikesell wrote:
On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 9:47 AM, Gene Poole gene.poole-swIuAdtPLFgAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org wrote:
During the installation I instituted software raid-1 along withLVM. It all worked perfectly until I got to the Boot Loader screen and instead of using the default (/dev/sda) I used what I thought would work in a raid-1 environment IF one of the hard drives went bad. I chose to install the boot loader in /dev/md0. Of course it would not boot. I recovered from this by going through the install and choosing to upgrade a existing installation and it allowed me to place the boot loader in /dev/sda. What that leaves me with is a raid-1 environment that works great as long as /dev/sda remains. How do I fix that???
The MBR isn't mirrored, so you just have to install grub on the other drive, usually by executing grub
There is an open bugzilla https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=799501
I am irritated regularly about this. Because It WORKSFORME. Of course the mbr isn't mirrored but at installation time it is written to both disks.
I wipe the mbr of sdb, reinstall and after that $ dd if=/dev/sdb count=1 bs=512|strings shows something like GRUB, on *both disks*
in /root/anaconda-ks.cfg I find bootloader --location=mbr --driveorder=sda,sdb ...
in the original kickstart there is bootloader --location=mbr ...
I did it per kickstart, is this a problem with manual installs only? Or only with upgrade mode (Gene said he used upgrade mode)? But then again there is this bugzilla...
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Gene Poole -
Les Mikesell -
Markus Falb