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