EL7 Mirror: “There Is No Installed Groups File.”

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I installed the RHEL 7 beta here to test while waiting for CentOS 7 to arrive. On noticing that yum didn’t work, I decided to set up a local mirror. I rsync’d

ftp://ftp.redhat.com/pub/redhat/rhel/beta/7/x86_64/os/Packages/

to a local web server here, then regenerated the repodata directory with createrepo.

Now yum works fine, for the most part. “yum search foo” pulls up a plausible list of packages, “yum install bar” chases dependencies as expected, etc.

Unfortunately, “yum groupinstall” isn’t working, which means I have no easy way to install Gnome on my minimal EL7 installation. Apparently I
need some kind of “groups file” to feed to createrepo –groupfile, but I
don’t know where to get one, or how to construct one. I’ve dug around on ftp.redhat.com and can’t find anything that looks plausible.

I’ve tried manually installing packages to build up this GNOME desktop, but despite installing dozens of things, startx still doesn’t give me something usable.

I know I could get a GNOME desktop by reinstalling the OS, but that would wipe out a lot of the local work I’ve done on this VM so far.

The only reason I need X in the first place is that system-config-printer no longer runs in text mode.

(I’m trying to set up a CUPS server. So yeah, X11 is a prerequisite for installing a printer now. Lovely.)

3 thoughts on - EL7 Mirror: “There Is No Installed Groups File.”

  • I ended up writing a 2-line .xinitrc file to solve this problem:

    xterm &
    exec metacity

    This at least lets me temporarily “shell into X,” as it were.

    This works because I’ve got enough of X and GNOME installed that I can get the GUI up and run programs, but the GNOME desktop proper isn’t yet completely functional.

  • Two suggestions:

    1. Make the last suggestion easier — browse to port 631 from another computer and use the browser interface to set up CUPS. (You may have to set a permission in a CUPS setup file to browse from another computer–been a while since i did this.)

    2. “ssh -X root@ system-config-printer” from an X-windows terminal program and your printer configuration will pop up in a window on the other computer. I use that for all kinds of things. You only need a couple of files {something about xauth… and font file(s)} and you can do GUI-based configuration on a headless server. [Works great for headless KVM hosts.]

    Ted Miller