Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Six non-Gentoo installs

[Tom H]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Grant Edwards
<grant.b.edwards@×××××.com> wrote:


> CentOS 7.0, however, was a mess.
>
> It took three attempts and almost an entire day of work.
>
> My first attempt was to use the "minimal" ISO image so that I would
> have the option of burning a CD if needed (I can't burn DVDs at the
> moment). That was a mistake. It was too minimal, and I couldn't get
> the network working to the point where I could configure repositories
> and install other stuff. Since the CentOS 7 ISO images all boot from
> USB flash drive anyway, staying under the 700MB CD size limit was moot
> anyway.
>
> Next I tried the net install ISO. I'm guessing I could have burned
> the DVD image to USB drive, but all I want is a minimal desktop
> system, so I figured why wait for a download of 3.5GB of stuff I don't
> care about.
>
> It still didn't recognize the NVidia Ethernet controller on my
> 5-year-old motherboard. After some cable swapping and futzing around,
> I got the netinstall going using the Realtek NIC.
>
> Maybe I just got unlucky and picked a slow mirror site, but once I got
> the install going, it ran for over 3 hours when installing a vanilla
> Gnome desktop system. Compare that with a 15 minute download time for
> a 700MB Xubuntu CD and then a 15 minute install.

AFAIK, the netinstall isn't really meant to be used over the net but
with a local mirror.


> CentOS 7 refused to install the bootloader in a partition: your only
> choices are MBR or nothing. When I manually installed grub legacy it
> failed because I had stupidly allowed CentOS to use ext4, and the
> build of Grub I had laying around didn't grok ext4.
>
> So I re-do the whole net install again using ext3 instead.
>
> Now, after manually installing Grub legacy in the CentOS 7 partition,
> it boots up.

The Anaconda developers have the same design philosophy as the Gnome
developers: fewer options, fewer options, fewer options, fewer
options, ...

In this particular case, they're just following the grub developers'
dislike of block lists; and the ext4 maintainer's described them as
emotionally insecure because of that.


> CentOS still doesn't recognize the NVidia motherboard Ethernet
> controller. After Google finds me a pages full of links to other
> people complaining about the exact same thing, I find out RedHat
> decided that the NVidia forcedeth driver wasn't widely used enough to
> deserve inclusion on an ISO image that was already 360+ MB. Thanks
> for that, RedHat. So it takes another 45 minutes of faffing around
> finding a third party src.rpm file for the forcedeth module and
> installing it. [It was either that or build a kernel and initrd.]

For future reference, elrepo.org is the best repo for RHEL issues like this one.

For RH, dropping forcedeth means cutting its support costs.