Installing GUI under CentOS 6
 

This isn't a question per se, it's a solution in case anybody else has the same problem as me.

I just installed CentOS 6 x86 and found that it didn't install the GUI. I googled "install gui under CentOS 6" and a few variations of that question and found a lot of pages that *almost* got me there, older solutions for similar distros long ago, but nothing that actully fully worked to get me the gui.

So in case anybody else has this problem, what actually worked for me was (as root):

yum groupinstall "X Window System"
yum install gnome*


Now unless you edit it, /etc/inittab will still be set to bring you up to runlevel 3 (i.e. all text) on bootup, but then after you login, typing "startx" will work like a charm.

Hope this saves someone some trouble.

Hello,

To add to that, you should change your init level to 5 before starting X, since run level 3 is networking support without X server. Just an FYI.

Cheers,

Josh

Actually Josh, I think you mean either "run level 5 is networking support WITH X server" or "run level 3 is networking support without X server".

When I just issue 'startx', the gui starts up and indeed, when I type 'who -r' I'm in run level 3, but as far as I can see, everything's working fine. I've got the gui, and networking. Terminal works. Firefox works. Xclock comes up.

So why bother change run level? What am I missing?

- Van

Thanks for that, it was definitely a typo. On the side note though, that is what run levels are normally used for. Honestly, I don't know why it would fully work like that, unless your method is just manually running X, without a hitch at all.

Thanks, Vanyel! This helped immensely. I think sometimes the Centos 6 install doesn't recognize the video card and so decides not to install X.