How to get a fully functional linux machine from the scratch?
 

Hello All,

I recently installed CentOS 5.4 in my laptop. Initially I had difficulties in getting the machine up and running. So I went with the option of installing just the bare bones of CentOS 5.4. I did this by clearing all selections that are shown by default when you load CentOS 5.4 CD 1/6. This installed just the kernel and created only the root user. Right now, my laptop boots up in command line and I can login only as root. I would like to know if there is any document or any web URL that explains how to get a fully functional system from the scratch. Something like an installer manual or check list with instructions. Is there any document that you can refer to in situations where you have to manually install the drivers and configure the system because of some odd combination of hardware the machine has.

Thanks for your time.

If I'm understanding you correctly (which I don't think I am) you want this: Linux From Scratch.

Regards,

Alunduil

I thought what he means is how to build a usable system off of what he has now, but I am also not sure.

You are exactly right.

@alunduil I know about the Linux from scratch. I think its purpose is different than what I need. I have got the kernel running. All I need to do now is get the other necessary packages up and running. Think of this something like you building your own linux machine and got the kernel up and running.

Well LFS or gentoo has a wealth of information on this type of setup, personally I would grab the debian boot floppys or the minimal install ISO and use apt to "build" your system as you see fit. Nothing wrong with centos, but it will be a little harder as its rpm based....or at least I believe it to be as I have never used it.

To go from where you are now, just start grabbing rpm packages with wget or curl and install them with rpm. A text browser like links or lynx could aid your search for packages you need.

Figure out what you want to do with the machine and install those packages...

If you want to install packages on CentOS, just use yum. Should get you going from there.

Regards,

Alunduil

If you have a working internet connection, just start installing packages with yum.

This is what I finally ended up doing. With CentOS, installing with the CDs seems to be trouble some. If you have CDs and no internet, I think the easiest way would be to dump all the rpms to a local directory and then install it from the hard drive. When I was trying to install X Windows, the required packages are spread through 4-5 CDs and dependency among some of the xorg packages make you go on a cycle. The install CDs needs to be organized in a better way.

not realy

i would reinstall BUT this time install the gui ( gnome)

and select the "default" install.

I did try the default install first and it took me more than 48 hours to install and run the first boot config (Please see this thread for details: CentOS 5.4 netinstall problems). In the end, all I saw was a blue screen. So I had to resort to installing just the kernel and then manually install everything. And thats what I am doing now.

I am sure there was lot of thinking behind the way the CD was organized. But whats puzzling me is when a rpm requires a lib file why not keep them in the same CD so that the installation goes thru fine. But I guess, the way the actual install process works by creating a local repo and install from there?!?!

A question -- what is your hardware ???
I had no -- zero -- problems installing CentOS 5.2,5.3 , and 5.4 on a 9 year old dell
with a 9 year old nvidia Geforce mx 400 card , and 512 meg ram ( is 1 gig now ) but cent 5.2 and fedora 4,5,6,7,8 all ran with 512 meg ram .

with the default installed Gnome . KDE 3.5 ( centOS) and kde 4 ( fedora 11 and Arch ) install just fine

i installed the Live cd CentOS-5.4-i386-LiveCD.iso
and it took about 1 hour .
http://mirror.facebook.net/centos/5.4/isos/i386/

Mine is a Toshiba Satellite M45-S269 laptop with 512MB RAM and 100GB HDD. It has Intel Centrino processor. I still dont know the root cause of the slow install :(

I haven't yet installed GNOME or KDE. I was expecting to see errors during X install if it has to do with the graphics driver. But the install went thru just fine.

First I tried the netinstall using http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5.4/os/i386/

Now I am noticing that there is another path as well: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-5/5.4/os/

I dont know what the difference between them?!?!?!

Then the next 2 attempts were using 6 install CDs. I even tried Fedora 12 LiveCD. Even with that I could only see blue screen with the fedora logo at the center. Nothing else.

I am happy with what I am having now. This enabled me to learn a lot.