[CentOS] Proper setup for major package removals?

Tue Oct 11 05:56:15 UTC 2016
waltdnes at waltdnes.org <waltdnes at waltdnes.org>

  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?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes at waltdnes.org>