CentOS 7.x from Scratch

This page targets primarily the setup of minimal CentOS 7.x installation.

Software and Applications

The installation and setup of the following software and applications will described.

• Minimal install of CentOS 7.x
• Xorg
• dwm windows manager
• dmenu
• st terminal

Installation

A simple way to set your screen resolution and color depth for most Live Linux distro's is via the use of the vga=parameter boot option. For example at boot you might type: Live vga=795. This would set your system to boot using the Live label with a screen resolution to 24bit 1280X1024. Here are some more examples of common vga boot values.

Depth	800x600	1024x786	1152x864	1280x1024	1600x1200
8 bit	vga=771	vga=773	vga=353	vga=775	vga=796
16 bit	vga=788	vga=791	vga=355	vga=794	vga=798
24 bit	vga=789	vga=792		vga=795	vga=799

Since this page targets the setup of a minimal CentOS 7 installation you should stick with the default minimal software selection during graphical installation of CentOS 7. Please keep in mind that with this minimal set of software you will not be able to join wireless networks. In order to automatically connect to the wireless network, which you have configured and used during the graphical installation process of CentOS 7, you have to have the following packages installed.

• NetworkManager.x86_64
• NetworkManager-libnm.x86_64
• NetworkManager-team.x86_64
• NetworkManager-tui.x86_64
• NetworkManager-wifi.x86_64

But usually the minimal install of CentOS 7 doesn't come with NetworkManager-wifi installed, which is not cool ... specially on my DELL Latitude E6510. So how do you get this package installed without wireless network connection. You don't wanna mess with cables at the end. Simplest way to go is to mount your installation medium, which is probably still hooked up, change to the repository directory and install the package manually. As root do the following to mount the installation medium and to install the missing package. The following example aims at CentOS 7.6 1804. Other versions may vary.

mkdir -p /mnt/usb1
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb1
cd /mnt/usb1/Packages
yum install -y NetworkManger-wifi-1.10.2-13.el7.x86_64.rpm
reboot

Environment

Without usable command line you'll be screwed. Replace your ~/.baschrc with the following or even better just clone this repo and follow the installation instructions.

# .bashrc
PS1='\h\w\$ '
export EDITOR=vi
export TERM=dtterm
export PATH=/usr/lib64/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/root/bin
alias vi='/usr/local/bin/vim -X'
alias l='/bin/ls --group-directories-first -lah | more'
alias cp='/bin/cp -r'

cd ~
git clone https://github.com/WieWaldi/.dotfiles
.dotfiles/setup.sh

To be able to get the suckless.org tools compiled you need to get these packages installed.

yum install -y vim git wget ftp make automake gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel patch net-tools bind-utils

yum install -y xorg-x11-xinit xorg-x11-apps xorg-x11-bitmaps xorg-x11-utils
yum install -y xorg-x11-drv-evdev xorg-x11-fonts-misc.noarch libXrandr-devel libX11-devel libXft-devel
yum install -y libXinerama-devel xterm imsettings ncurses-term ncurses-devel webkitgtk4-devel
yum install -y glib2-devel gcr-devel mesa-libegl mesa-libgl mesa-dri-drivers dbus-x11

yum install -y webkitgtk4-devel glib2-devel gcr-devel mesa-libegl mesa-libgl mesa-dri-drivers xorg-x11-utils libconfig-devel
yum install -y "gstreamer*"

VirtualBox

VirtualBox installation really sucks since they only tell what to do and not how to do. From this site

sudo yum install "kernel-devel-uname-r == $(uname -r)"