Installing Desktop Faster

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Hi there,

I installed CentOS 7 — it works great.

What made me think is that installation took 1300 packages for a Desktop with some add-ons.

As usual, there might be a solution for this already but I do not know it. Would it be possible to create one big package for a standard Desktop? Then an installation would not take ages.

– Gergely

6 thoughts on - Installing Desktop Faster

  • Do you mean yum groupinstall?

    in CentOS 6.5;

    yum groupinstall “X Window System” “KDE Desktop Environment” “Fonts”

    Will install a Desktop on a minimal install.

    Cheers,

    Andrew

  • FreeBSD base system is installed similarly to what you suggest: just by unpacking a few tgz files containing it. This, however, only comprises base system; the rest necessary for workstation (such as Xwindow system, office suites, etc) are to be added separately.

    However, once the system is installed it would be a nightmare to update
    “one single enormously large” package (as someone already mentioned).

    Luckily, there is nice equivalent of what you would like standard Desktop installation would be, or anything else which you can tweak to your needs once and then install that tweaked system with one go on as many boxes as you wish. It is called “kickstart”. Even better: RedHat (and CentOS) have more or less preconfigured set of stuff to install (minimal, Desktop, server, Development workstation,…) you can just use one of them in graphic installer and voila, you will have it installed with minimal brain effort.

    Just my 2c

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • and my experience is, kickstart installs off a reasonably fast NFS
    server over gigE are /way/ faster than CDROM/DVDROM installs.

  • Exactly. Moreover, this gives you nice incentive to maintain mirror in your server room, I personally don’t mind ours to be official public one
    (and I do not shape traffic ;-)

    Valeri

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

  • which totally makes sense (stolen from wikipedia):
    CD, DVD and Blu-ray writing speeds Media 1X speed Capacity
    Mbit/s kB/s KiB/s CD 1.229 153.6 150.0 0.734 80
    DVD 11.080 1,385.0 1,352.5 4.7 57
    Blu-ray Disc 36.000 4,500.0 4,394.5 25.0 93

    so even with with 8x dvd, that’s only [optimally] 88Mbit/s vs around 6-700 (assuming collisions and generally unable to push an ethernet network to it’s theoretical max)

    I only mention it because it floored me when someone at work brought up the other day that a splunk cluster got faster performance by getting data by going to network to get info from another cluster host’s memory rather than going to its own local disk for the same data