This lacks sufficient detail to answer your question, I can only speculate that somehow you’re telling the installer to delete the Windows 7 installation.
Since CentOS install media doesn’t include ntfsprogs (I haven’t checked if 7.1 does), it’s not possible to shrink NTFS in the CentOS
installer. You’d have to do the shrink in Windows, and then Anaconda will install by default into the resulting free space.
unfortunately, even having done that, Anaconda/Grub2 will not create a dual-boot setup because the default installs do not include ntfs-3g or ntfsprogs. I’ve posted a recipe before for making a grub2 dual-boot setup AFTER the installation, I can do it again if anyone needs it, but otherwise won’t clutter up the list with another copy of it .
Right. So basically yum install ntfsprogs and then grub2-mkconfig -o
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg assuming this is a system with BIOS firmware.
My understanding is CentOS doesn’t really support dual-boot anyway, whereas Fedora does.
Nope. CentOS 5, 6 and 7 all support dual-boot.
Since Linux first came out in ’92, every distro I’ve used– SLS, Slackware, Redhat, Suse, CentOS, and probably one or two others– *all*
have allowed dual-boot. The feature is built into grub, and lilo before that. Anyone who put together a distro which didn’t support dual-boot would have to take the feature out– rewrite the code (and why do that just to take out a perfectly functioning feature?)–, else use some other boot loader… e.g., the Raspberry Pi distros don’t support dual-boot AFAIK.
Considering CentOS 7, at least, doesn’t include ntfsprogs, the installation of CentOS can’t support shrink or discovery of Windows in order to create a GRUB menu entry for it. That tools exist the user can make this work after installation is not at all what I’d consider
“supported”.
Dual boot support has a large number of dependencies, it’s not just dependent on GRUB doing the right thing. When ntfsprogs isn’t included on installation media, for example, Windows dual boot isn’t going to happen at install time, you have to do it manually after installing ntfsprogs.
Further, Anaconda (the installer used by RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) does not support enabling all LVs at installation time. Therefore GRUB
won’t find other Linux installations. So a default CentOS installation followed by a default Fedora installation, or vice versa; or CentOS/Fedora n system which then has n+1 installed, renders the n version unbootable. The user has to fix this post install. I’d hardly call this form of dual boot support, any kind of support whatsoever. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id
That’s a really narrow interpretation.
The behavior you describe, where the OS installer can shrink an existing NTFS partition to allow room for Linux partitions doesn’t go back to 1992, yet we managed to dual-boot back then.
Would it be *nice* if RHEL/Fedora/CentOS could do this? Sure. Is it a necessary prerequisite? Absolutely not.
I’ve suggested that the distribution doesn’t support dual boot if it has no hand in making it possible. The user doing this on their own manually is user enabled and supported. The distro has nothing to do with it.
I’ll argue that the four freedoms aren’t meaningful when they only benefit a scant minority. And the end result is, increasingly, developers are picking Macs because so many basic UI/UX things are handled so well and continue to be a PITA on Linux (desktop in particular). http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/31714.html
—
Chris Murphy
The difference between us is that you see that as a problem.
There are a great many things the CentOS installer doesn’t do for you, that you are expected to do for yourself.
Ah, it’s *philosophy* then. The “science” that lets us spin words until we get ourselves so dizzy we can’t think straight. Sigh.
Given that CentOS doesn’t let you create C programs without any knowledge of how to program, would you also argue that CentOS doesn’t give you Freedom 0?
This is what happens when you start using entitlement arguments.
CentOS isn’t required to do absolutely everything for you that it could possibly do. Someone has to spend the time to make that happen. If you are not willing and able to do this work yourself, you have no claim on the time of people who can.
OS X *also* doesn’t resize Windows partitions for you.
OS X’s Boot Camp feature will resize an HFS+ partition to make room for Windows, but it can’t then split the NTFS partition to make room for Linux.
Boot Camp won’t even support triple boot. If you want to, you’re into a situation that’s considerably more complicated than what you have to go through to dual-boot Windows and CentOS:
Oh, and lest you think I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m writing this on an OS X box which I’m using instead of CentOS not because CentOS sucks, but because Apple is one of the few sources of really nice modern Unix workstations. I’ve got a SecureCRT window constantly open to the CentOS box I develop on, I’m making a CentOS 7.1 USB stick right now in the background, and I’m about to build another CentOS server once it’s finished dd’ing that stick.
So no, “developers” are not abandoning Linux for OS X. A bunch of us are choosing to use OS X on the desktop, but when it comes to deployment, well, let’s just say that macminicolo.net is very much on the fringe.
It is a problem for everyone except the privileged few. It is not a problem for me, because I happen to be one of the privileged few and I
happen to think dual boot UX is complete utter shit and therefore avoid it whenever possible. But that reality doesn’t help everybody else achieve their goals.
And those are likewise things that are not supported by the CentOS
installer. All I’ve said here is that dual boot is NOT actually supported by the CentOS installer.
Now if you want to argue that’s a bug, and ntfsprogs should have been included in the media so that this could be supported, that’s an improvement. But the support would still be weak because it’d still be broken in more use cases.
I’m not dizzy, my clarity on this is quite good. Philosophy is in part what’s brought us the concept of libre software in the first place, I
seriously doubt you’re going to castigate the whole concept of free software just because it’s founded in a philosophy of, you know, freedom.
No, but that would render the freedoms moot. Programs are assumed to exist, just like electricity is assumed to exist.
No entitlement argument has been made. Software freedom doesn’t matter if there’s no software. Software freedom doesn’t matter if there are no users. When you have users who need a particular workflow for which all the programs exist, and the solutions to deficiencies are known but aren’t addressed by development, then there are disenfranchised users and to them the freedoms don’t matter. Those freedoms can’t be realized without access. I’m not saying access is a right or an entitlement, I’m saying the lack of access has consequences, and that consequence is free software is rendered impotent to those users. It doesn’t free them if it’s not something they can use.
I’m not making a claim on anyone’s time. I’m stating, as provable fact, that as a consequence of those who could do this work and choose not to, even when the problems and solutions are clear and even well tested, many users who could and would use free software do not use free software. They resort to using proprietary software.
Triple booting is an unsupported configuration by Apple. Installing OS
X after Windows is an unsupported configuration. There is only one supported configuration, and that’s a disk with one (visible)
partition with OS X on it. Boot Camp Assistant will only split that configuration to make room for a single Windows installation.
But this can be done with CLI tools successfully. But it’s still unsupported by Boot Camp Assistant. Just like CentOS’s installer not being able to shrink NTFS, install to free space, and configure a boot loader that boots both OS’s means the CentOS installer doesn’t support dual boot (with Windows, and also doesn’t support dual boot with any Linux that uses LVM).
I’m being completely consistent here. Just because there’s some way for the user to make something work doesn’t mean it’s supported by anyone except them.
I don’t know what “really nice modern Unix workstation” means in contrast to CentOS. OK it’s nice, but it must also necessarily be better in some important ways or you’d use CentOS.
At this moment I’m using Fedora 22 on a Mac mainly because I’m testing. Most of the time I use OS X because it’s more reliable in pretty much every single way: automatic graphics switching just works, the track pad just works, and Bluetooth just works. At the moment all of those things when running any Linux distro make the system next to unusable for more than a few hours. So because choices, including Apple’s choice to keep so much of their hardware proprietary and their hardware vendors shushed, and my choice to buy this hardware, as a consequence my experience of software freedom is more limited.
I’m not asserting rights.
I’ve got a SecureCRT window constantly open to the CentOS box I
develop on, I’m making a CentOS 7.1 USB stick right now in the background, and I’m about to build another CentOS server once it’s finished dd’ing that stick.
OK well it’s funny you say they’re not abandoning Linux for OS X while you’re doing what so many others have decided to do which is make OS X
their primary platform for free software development because of some deficiency of doing that work on a free OS. You are not wholesale abandoning Linux, but you have abandoned it for certain work loads presumably for completely rational reasons where you conclude your productivity is simply better on OS X. So instead of a vague “it’s a nice platform” without stating the pros of OS X or the cons of CentOS
(or Linux in general) you haven’t really helped stem this transition.
I’d prefer to see free software developed on free software. That’s why I continue to put in a lot of effort on QA’ing Fedora.
—
Chris Murphy
Freedom isn’t free. Someone has to do the work.
I have yet to see how you explain who will do this work, how those people will get the resources to do this work, or what your role is in helping with the provisioning of those resources.
And I still have yet to see how any of this involves the CentOS project, short of distributing the result as part of CentOS 8+.
“Free” time is not free. It is a gift of someone’s finite time on this Earth.
You have said that you are not entitled to receive this gift, and that you have no natural right to it. I don’t see that you are spending your own free time writing the software, nor are you hiring others to do it for you. So why do you expect to get this gift? Who will give it to you, undeserved, and why?
I came up in computers in the early 1980s, when every computer came with a BASIC interpreter, and all the computer magazines had programs in them. The expectation at the time was that everyone who wanted to use a computer would create at least *some* of their own programs.
Then people discovered that they could give money to other people to get them to license them copies of programs they created.
Others discovered that they’d rather just give the software away, under assorted licenses and schemes.
The missing link is the tie between that latter group and the necessity that they create arbitrary programs for you. You will not join them, and you disclaim a right to their time and resources. So where’s the link?
Until you can close this gap, all you’ve got is Sad Trombone.
A developer may switch to OS X on the desktop while still writing software primarily on and for Linux, and while deploying primarily to Linux. I held myself up as an example of this. I’m not alone.
I have reason to believe that software I wrote is running on many thousands of Linux boxes. (I have no way to count them. It’s just a guess.) Why does it matter which OS was running the text editor that software was written in?
Developer adoption of OS X will not be the thing that destroys Linux, if anything ever does. OS X’s popularity probably is exchanging some potential Linux growth for BSD growth, but that’s not so bad a thing, is it? The BSDs can use a lot more developer love than mainstream Linuxes like CentOS.
Am 01.07.2015 um 18:20 schrieb Chris Murphy:
My experience is different: my system previously comes with Windows-7, which I shrinked and installed CentOS-6 in parallel, where the installer created an entry to start windows. Later when CentOS-7 comes out, I
replaced Windows by CentOS-7. After installation, the Grub2 boot menu included entries to start CenOS-6. The only problem (not really) is that a kernel update in CentOS-6 does not update the boot menu, I must boot CentOS-7 and rebuild it there.
13 thoughts on - Installing Cents Os Server 7.0
Am 01.07.2015 um 08:52 schrieb Michael Wright:
I apologize but let us start with
in general
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
and especially
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html#beprecise
This lacks sufficient detail to answer your question, I can only speculate that somehow you’re telling the installer to delete the Windows 7 installation.
Since CentOS install media doesn’t include ntfsprogs (I haven’t checked if 7.1 does), it’s not possible to shrink NTFS in the CentOS
installer. You’d have to do the shrink in Windows, and then Anaconda will install by default into the resulting free space.
unfortunately, even having done that, Anaconda/Grub2 will not create a dual-boot setup because the default installs do not include ntfs-3g or ntfsprogs. I’ve posted a recipe before for making a grub2 dual-boot setup AFTER the installation, I can do it again if anyone needs it, but otherwise won’t clutter up the list with another copy of it .
Right. So basically yum install ntfsprogs and then grub2-mkconfig -o
/boot/grub2/grub.cfg assuming this is a system with BIOS firmware.
My understanding is CentOS doesn’t really support dual-boot anyway, whereas Fedora does.
Nope. CentOS 5, 6 and 7 all support dual-boot.
Since Linux first came out in ’92, every distro I’ve used– SLS, Slackware, Redhat, Suse, CentOS, and probably one or two others– *all*
have allowed dual-boot. The feature is built into grub, and lilo before that. Anyone who put together a distro which didn’t support dual-boot would have to take the feature out– rewrite the code (and why do that just to take out a perfectly functioning feature?)–, else use some other boot loader… e.g., the Raspberry Pi distros don’t support dual-boot AFAIK.
Considering CentOS 7, at least, doesn’t include ntfsprogs, the installation of CentOS can’t support shrink or discovery of Windows in order to create a GRUB menu entry for it. That tools exist the user can make this work after installation is not at all what I’d consider
“supported”.
Dual boot support has a large number of dependencies, it’s not just dependent on GRUB doing the right thing. When ntfsprogs isn’t included on installation media, for example, Windows dual boot isn’t going to happen at install time, you have to do it manually after installing ntfsprogs.
Further, Anaconda (the installer used by RHEL, CentOS, Fedora) does not support enabling all LVs at installation time. Therefore GRUB
won’t find other Linux installations. So a default CentOS installation followed by a default Fedora installation, or vice versa; or CentOS/Fedora n system which then has n+1 installed, renders the n version unbootable. The user has to fix this post install. I’d hardly call this form of dual boot support, any kind of support whatsoever. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id
That’s a really narrow interpretation.
The behavior you describe, where the OS installer can shrink an existing NTFS partition to allow room for Linux partitions doesn’t go back to 1992, yet we managed to dual-boot back then.
Would it be *nice* if RHEL/Fedora/CentOS could do this? Sure. Is it a necessary prerequisite? Absolutely not.
I’ve suggested that the distribution doesn’t support dual boot if it has no hand in making it possible. The user doing this on their own manually is user enabled and supported. The distro has nothing to do with it.
I disagree.
Along the same lines as this, relating primarily to security and privacy:
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/32686.html
I’ll argue that the four freedoms aren’t meaningful when they only benefit a scant minority. And the end result is, increasingly, developers are picking Macs because so many basic UI/UX things are handled so well and continue to be a PITA on Linux (desktop in particular). http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/31714.html
—
Chris Murphy
The difference between us is that you see that as a problem.
There are a great many things the CentOS installer doesn’t do for you, that you are expected to do for yourself.
Ah, it’s *philosophy* then. The “science” that lets us spin words until we get ourselves so dizzy we can’t think straight. Sigh.
Given that CentOS doesn’t let you create C programs without any knowledge of how to program, would you also argue that CentOS doesn’t give you Freedom 0?
This is what happens when you start using entitlement arguments.
CentOS isn’t required to do absolutely everything for you that it could possibly do. Someone has to spend the time to make that happen. If you are not willing and able to do this work yourself, you have no claim on the time of people who can.
OS X *also* doesn’t resize Windows partitions for you.
OS X’s Boot Camp feature will resize an HFS+ partition to make room for Windows, but it can’t then split the NTFS partition to make room for Linux.
Boot Camp won’t even support triple boot. If you want to, you’re into a situation that’s considerably more complicated than what you have to go through to dual-boot Windows and CentOS:
http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp
Oh, and lest you think I have no idea what I’m talking about, I’m writing this on an OS X box which I’m using instead of CentOS not because CentOS sucks, but because Apple is one of the few sources of really nice modern Unix workstations. I’ve got a SecureCRT window constantly open to the CentOS box I develop on, I’m making a CentOS 7.1 USB stick right now in the background, and I’m about to build another CentOS server once it’s finished dd’ing that stick.
So no, “developers” are not abandoning Linux for OS X. A bunch of us are choosing to use OS X on the desktop, but when it comes to deployment, well, let’s just say that macminicolo.net is very much on the fringe.
It is a problem for everyone except the privileged few. It is not a problem for me, because I happen to be one of the privileged few and I
happen to think dual boot UX is complete utter shit and therefore avoid it whenever possible. But that reality doesn’t help everybody else achieve their goals.
And those are likewise things that are not supported by the CentOS
installer. All I’ve said here is that dual boot is NOT actually supported by the CentOS installer.
Now if you want to argue that’s a bug, and ntfsprogs should have been included in the media so that this could be supported, that’s an improvement. But the support would still be weak because it’d still be broken in more use cases.
I’m not dizzy, my clarity on this is quite good. Philosophy is in part what’s brought us the concept of libre software in the first place, I
seriously doubt you’re going to castigate the whole concept of free software just because it’s founded in a philosophy of, you know, freedom.
No, but that would render the freedoms moot. Programs are assumed to exist, just like electricity is assumed to exist.
No entitlement argument has been made. Software freedom doesn’t matter if there’s no software. Software freedom doesn’t matter if there are no users. When you have users who need a particular workflow for which all the programs exist, and the solutions to deficiencies are known but aren’t addressed by development, then there are disenfranchised users and to them the freedoms don’t matter. Those freedoms can’t be realized without access. I’m not saying access is a right or an entitlement, I’m saying the lack of access has consequences, and that consequence is free software is rendered impotent to those users. It doesn’t free them if it’s not something they can use.
I’m not making a claim on anyone’s time. I’m stating, as provable fact, that as a consequence of those who could do this work and choose not to, even when the problems and solutions are clear and even well tested, many users who could and would use free software do not use free software. They resort to using proprietary software.
Triple booting is an unsupported configuration by Apple. Installing OS
X after Windows is an unsupported configuration. There is only one supported configuration, and that’s a disk with one (visible)
partition with OS X on it. Boot Camp Assistant will only split that configuration to make room for a single Windows installation.
But this can be done with CLI tools successfully. But it’s still unsupported by Boot Camp Assistant. Just like CentOS’s installer not being able to shrink NTFS, install to free space, and configure a boot loader that boots both OS’s means the CentOS installer doesn’t support dual boot (with Windows, and also doesn’t support dual boot with any Linux that uses LVM).
I’m being completely consistent here. Just because there’s some way for the user to make something work doesn’t mean it’s supported by anyone except them.
I don’t know what “really nice modern Unix workstation” means in contrast to CentOS. OK it’s nice, but it must also necessarily be better in some important ways or you’d use CentOS.
At this moment I’m using Fedora 22 on a Mac mainly because I’m testing. Most of the time I use OS X because it’s more reliable in pretty much every single way: automatic graphics switching just works, the track pad just works, and Bluetooth just works. At the moment all of those things when running any Linux distro make the system next to unusable for more than a few hours. So because choices, including Apple’s choice to keep so much of their hardware proprietary and their hardware vendors shushed, and my choice to buy this hardware, as a consequence my experience of software freedom is more limited.
I’m not asserting rights.
I’ve got a SecureCRT window constantly open to the CentOS box I
develop on, I’m making a CentOS 7.1 USB stick right now in the background, and I’m about to build another CentOS server once it’s finished dd’ing that stick.
OK well it’s funny you say they’re not abandoning Linux for OS X while you’re doing what so many others have decided to do which is make OS X
their primary platform for free software development because of some deficiency of doing that work on a free OS. You are not wholesale abandoning Linux, but you have abandoned it for certain work loads presumably for completely rational reasons where you conclude your productivity is simply better on OS X. So instead of a vague “it’s a nice platform” without stating the pros of OS X or the cons of CentOS
(or Linux in general) you haven’t really helped stem this transition.
I’d prefer to see free software developed on free software. That’s why I continue to put in a lot of effort on QA’ing Fedora.
—
Chris Murphy
Freedom isn’t free. Someone has to do the work.
I have yet to see how you explain who will do this work, how those people will get the resources to do this work, or what your role is in helping with the provisioning of those resources.
And I still have yet to see how any of this involves the CentOS project, short of distributing the result as part of CentOS 8+.
“Free” time is not free. It is a gift of someone’s finite time on this Earth.
You have said that you are not entitled to receive this gift, and that you have no natural right to it. I don’t see that you are spending your own free time writing the software, nor are you hiring others to do it for you. So why do you expect to get this gift? Who will give it to you, undeserved, and why?
I came up in computers in the early 1980s, when every computer came with a BASIC interpreter, and all the computer magazines had programs in them. The expectation at the time was that everyone who wanted to use a computer would create at least *some* of their own programs.
Then people discovered that they could give money to other people to get them to license them copies of programs they created.
Others discovered that they’d rather just give the software away, under assorted licenses and schemes.
The missing link is the tie between that latter group and the necessity that they create arbitrary programs for you. You will not join them, and you disclaim a right to their time and resources. So where’s the link?
Until you can close this gap, all you’ve got is Sad Trombone.
A developer may switch to OS X on the desktop while still writing software primarily on and for Linux, and while deploying primarily to Linux. I held myself up as an example of this. I’m not alone.
I have reason to believe that software I wrote is running on many thousands of Linux boxes. (I have no way to count them. It’s just a guess.) Why does it matter which OS was running the text editor that software was written in?
Developer adoption of OS X will not be the thing that destroys Linux, if anything ever does. OS X’s popularity probably is exchanging some potential Linux growth for BSD growth, but that’s not so bad a thing, is it? The BSDs can use a lot more developer love than mainstream Linuxes like CentOS.
Am 01.07.2015 um 18:20 schrieb Chris Murphy:
My experience is different: my system previously comes with Windows-7, which I shrinked and installed CentOS-6 in parallel, where the installer created an entry to start windows. Later when CentOS-7 comes out, I
replaced Windows by CentOS-7. After installation, the Grub2 boot menu included entries to start CenOS-6. The only problem (not really) is that a kernel update in CentOS-6 does not update the boot menu, I must boot CentOS-7 and rebuild it there.
__
Gabriella