[CentOS] 'Many' packages installed - CentOS 4.1

John Hinton webmaster at ew3d.com
Thu Aug 25 15:14:51 UTC 2005


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 Hinton



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