Minimising A CentOS Installation
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?
Regards, Anand
7 thoughts on - Minimising A CentOS Installation
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 :).
Our post-install removal command here is:
dnf -y remove cockpit* pcp*
But we’re old-school Unix geeks, so there you go. :)
These aren’t present in a minimal CentOS 8 installation.
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 …
Thanks for this. I did a little searching and found this page:
https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-remove-orphaned-packages-on-CentOS-linux
It worked for me:
Get a list of orphaned packages:
$ package-cleanup –leaves
Remove them:
# yum remove `package-cleanup –leaves`
That’s only if you’re OK removing all of them.
Not sure why but at least on two C8S systems (not all)
the kernel rpms are listed as leaves, also the running one. So, better don’t execute the above command …
Investigating why other C8S systems do not show the kernel rpms …
I’m on C8S, and my package-cleanup –leaves is now clear.