yum grouplist and yum groupinstall are what you want to use with yum. yum grouplist tells you the available groups (similar to the groups available at install) yum groupinstall installs them. Keep in mind that the shell won't deal with spaces nicely, so you'll need to quote or escape. for example -> yum groupinstall 'X Window System' 'GNOME Desktop Environment' 'Sound and Video' This should get you want you want. If you want kde, use grouplist to figure out the group name, and swap that group for the gnome group above. thanks - seems to be OK but after the packages are downloaded i get this Transaction Summary ============================================================================= Install 196 Package(s) Update 2 Package(s) Remove 0 Package(s) Total download size: 253 M Is this ok [y/N]: y Downloading Packages: warning: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: V3 DSA signature: NOKEY, key ID 6b8d79e6 Public key for lftp-3.4.2-1.2.el4.rf.i386.rpm is not installed any ideas? I have installed the key at http://mirror.centos.org/centos/RPM-GPG-KEY-CentOS-4 so any ideas? thanks