On Sat, 29 Apr 2017 17:13:30 +0100, Pete Biggs wrote: > On Sat, 2017-04-29 at 15:43 +0000, Beartooth wrote: >> My wife bought a new Thinkpad, on which we had the shop install >> CentOS 7 (I *think* it's 7.3.) Alas!, I didn't think to specify NOT >> Gnome, >> in thunder. So of course I got it. >> >> I've tried several times to force myself to accommodate Gnome3, >> always with no joy. How do I get Mate or Xfce instead? > > I hope this doesn't sound rude, it's not meant to, but have you googled > for it? The first hit on 'install xfce centos7' or 'install mate > centos7' gives the answers in much more detail than I can go into here. > But basically, install epel and then > > yum groupinstall "Xfce" > > or > > yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop" No, actually, I hadn't realized Google could do things that fancy; thanks for the pointer! >> Related problem: when I become root and tell it "yum update," it >> figures out a list of umpteen hundred rpms to update, but then runs >> through attempts at mirrors and keeps failing till it runs out. It >> failed to connect to my wireless router (or even to find it, afaict). >> So I plugged it into the router with an ethernet cable. No joy. >> >> > Do you have any net connection at all? Can you see websites? If you > can't see the outside world, updates aren't going to happen. No, and I can neither ssh nor scp over my LAN. We had a lightning strike a month or so back that must've been right next to the house: blindingly bright, and with huge thunder simultaneously. It fried both the cable modem and the router; and I haven't yet managed to install DD-WRT (or whatever may have succeeded it) onto the router.