On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 11:17:11 -0400 Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 at 10:25, Anand Buddhdev <anandb at ripe.net> wrote: > > > > Hi folks, > > > > After doing a minimal CentOS 8.4 installation, I found the following > > packages to be useful for a simple server, so I removed them: > > > > cronie-anacron (replaced with cronie-noanacron) > > alsa-firmware > > ivtv-firmware > > iwl*-firmware > > sssd-common (along with all packages that depended on it) > > > > What other things do folk usually remove to make their installation > > smaller? > > Usually it breaks down at this point because everyone has different > things they want for their minimal install. Getting 3 people to agree > on a minimal working set seems to be harder than doing a three body > physics problem :). Exactly. To me a minimal install has just enough to run sshd, an editor*, and yum. It’s not very useful, so then I add diagnostics, logging and management software, and it is no longer minimal. My typical approach is to run `package-cleanup --leaves --all` or `yum leaves` (might need software not on CentOS 8) and justify everything that is there. I have about 85 leaf packages on a CentOS 7 web server, so a minimal package set should be smaller. Experiment with a disposable VM so it is easy to recover from mistakes. Jim * vi, or emacs, or ...