Installing Centos 5

First things first.. In order to install CentOS I needed to download a copy of the latest build of the installation kit. To do that, I went to the CentOS website http://www.centos.org, and right on the main page they point you the a list of mirror server where you have to option to download the ISO version of either the installation DVD or the 6-CD set. For convenience there is included a torrent to download the CD-based installation media.

I opted for the DVD version and went on with the download. 3Gb and 1 burned DVD later I had myself a shiny new DVD ready to spit out a new installation of CentOS 5. I put the DVD in the computer and told it use the CD-ROM to boot and patiently waited for the installation to begin. Well, nothing is ever easy and so was the case here. This particular DELL Dimension 8400 would not boot off of a DVD no matter what I told it.

I would not give up though. I've spent the better part of the day figuring out how to make the darn DELL boot from DVD.. The next day I decided that time would be better spent downloading the CD media and installing that way. I decided I would download just the first CD and run a minimal install. Then I would download and install the rest of the packages I was interested in.

I was ready now! I put the CD in, told the DELL to boot from CD-ROM and this time it happily informed me that the CentOS installer was ready to begin and gave me the option to proceed with the graphical installer or go with the text-based version, guerilla style.

Running through the installation wizard is a breeze. Select the language, select the time-zone, choose which drive to install to. Then choose a partition layout. You can use the default layout and let the installer re-partition and format the drive for you or you can go custom. I chose custom because I wanted to be able to have a secondary partition for back-up purposes. This way I split may hard drive as follows:

Obviously, CentOS would live on partition 1, partiton 5 would be the linux swap, and partition 3 would be were I intended to store my backups. The reason I chose ntfs for that is because of the back-up software I use which only knows how to handle NTFS and FAT file systems. Plus, NTFS is not such a bad file system after all.

After setting up my partition, the installer, rather politely, asks you whether you want to install and use GRUB as your bootloader. It also lets you set a password and configure some other paramters for the bootloader. It even lets you specify whter to install GRUB on a certain partition (i.e. for multi OS systems).

I installed GRUB on the MBR (to act as my first and only bootloader) and I chose a password for it. I strongly recommend using a password here, especially if you think someone might have physical access to your machine. The password will only be required if you need to access and configure GRUB at boot time (to boot a different OS for example). Otherwise the system will boot up in linux by default. Obviously these settings may be different for your setup if you wish to install CentOS on a machine along with other operating systems!

The next step is to perform an initial network configuration which may be used if you want to install packages from some custom repositories. There is the option to use DHCP to obtain an IP address or to manually configure it. If it is a server installation you would tipically want to use manual IP configuration. I selected the automatic configuration since I was installing on a different network than the network the server would eventually reside. I chose to manually configure the hostname and I gave the new machine a name and put the domain suffix of the network it would eventually be part of.

After all those pretty straight forward steps comes the big hurdle. After you configure which repositories you wish to use for the installation, you have tow options. Proceed with default installation. Or be brave and customize your installation. Here is the nasty part though. I had only burned the first CD or the 6 required to do the full install so I thought I'd try the default configuration and deal with it later when it was all installed. WRONG! The default installation requires ALL 6 OF THE CDs!

I had to go ahead and customize my order to hopefully reduce the required media to the first CD. The next screen allows you to pick and choose which packages to install but it doesn't exactly tell you where they are located or what exactly is each package's purpose. So, unless you know exactly what you want you'll be left to wonder through the packages and figure what to put on and what not to. After a few attempts I resorted to doing some more research online and I realized that doing the bare-bones install wasn't going to save me much time in the long run and decided to go back a couple of steps to downloading the rest of the installation discs.

After I had all 6 of the discs downloaded I decided to go in fully prepared and get this installation done! I proceeded to verify the media before I started the installation and found out the a few of the discs had been compromised while being burned. So, I re-burned the two discs, retested them and when all 6 of them passed restarted the installation.