Welcome to CentOS 6.4 Installer Menu

To start your installation of Centos 6.4, simply highlight the "Install or upgrade an existing system" and press enter. Your installation will now start.

Test Media

It is always recommended that you test your media before carrying out an installation. If you are happy that your media is OK, then select "skip" to continue.

CentOS Logo

To continue with your installation, click "Next".

Select Installation Language

At this screen you will need to select the language to be used during your installation.

Select Keyboard

From this screen you need to select the keyboard type to be used with your installation. I have selected "united Kingdom" in the example.

Select Installation Device

From this menu, select "Basic Storage Devices" (assuming you will be using a standard hard drive).

Storage Device Warning

From this screen you must confirm that any data on the specified disk can be discarded. Choose the option "Yes, discard any data" if you ar happy to continue.

Select a hostname for your system

Select the name you want to use for your system on your network. This name should be a unique name on your network. It is good practice to use a naming convention that perhaps describes the server type and number if you have numerous servers. For this example I have gone with " centos64".

Select Time Zone Location

Choose the location that you are located in. In the example, I have chosen "Europe/London" as this is my location.

Root Password

You must now specify a root password to be used for administering your system.

Installation Type?

From this screen you must select one of the options. In the example I have chosen "Use All Space" as this is a virtual disk and no other operating systems are present.

Write Configuration to Disk

If you are happy with your selections, you need to choose the ""Write changes to disk" to continue with the installation.

Choose OS Installation Type

Various choices are available to choose from depending on your planned use for your system. In this example I have chosen the default installation option. This will provide a basic system without a graphical interface. A Graphical interface (desktop) can be added after your installation. This will be covered later. To complete your installation, click "Next".

Installation complete

Congratulations, your minimal CentOS 6.4 installation is now complete. You must remove any media from your CD/DVD drive and reboot your system.

CentOS Loading Screen

If all goes well, you should see the following loading screen while your system is booting.

Login Screen

From the login screen, you will need to login with the "root" user account and password.

Configuring the Network

Before we continue with creating any additional accounts, we need to define our network connection "eth0".

The command ip a s is used to display our current interfaces . The one we are interested in is "eth0". Currently their is no IP address assigned and the interface is indicating that it is in a DOWN state.

To configure "eth0" to obtain an IP address automatically, we need to check that it is using "dhcp" and that the interface should be started automatically at boot". We can check the current configuration by navigating to "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts". Our interface configuration is stored in a file called "ifcfg-eth0".

Configuring interface eth0

Using an editor of your choice, you will need to edit the file "ifcfg-eth0" file an change its settings to match the ones below. You must not change the "HWADDR" or "UUID" options as these will be correct for your system. The only change should be to ensure that the "ONBOOT" option is set to "yes".:

DEVICE=eth0
HWADDR=08:00:27:C3:1F:C8
TYPE=Ethernet
UUID=399e364f-e278-4969-9dc7-3481618ede62
ONBOOT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=yes
BOOTPROTO=dhcp

Once you have made your changes and saved these. You will need to restart your network services with the command:

service network restart

Now if we issue the command ip a s we should see that our interface has now been assigned an IP address.

Adding a new user account

At some point you will need to create a local account on your installation. The easiest way to achieve this is to issue the "useradd" command. In the example below the following commands were issued to create a user called "john". (amend accordingly)

useradd -m -c "John Local Account" john

The above will create the user "john" with a home area of "/home/john". Before you can use the account, you will need to set a password.

The command for assigning a password is passwd

passwd john

You will be asked to verify your password.

Reboot your system

To test out our new account and our network interface, we are going to reboot our server. The command to reboot is:

shutdown -r now

Our server should now shut down and restart. Once the server is backup we can use our new account:

Installing a Graphical Desktop (GNOME or KDE)

To install the GNOME desktop simply issue the command:

yum -y groupinstall "Desktop" "Desktop Platform" "X Window System" "Fonts"

You may also install the KDE desktop if you prefer with the command:

yum -y groupinstall kde-desktop

Change Current runlevel

As we have decided to add the GNOME desktop, we will need to change our default runlevel from "3" to "5" for the graphical environment to load. To do this we need to edit the following line in the file "/etc/inittab"

id:3:initdefault:

Currently this line specifies to start in a none graphical mode (runlevel 3). We need to change this to specify runlevel "5". Amend the line to read:

id:5:initdefault:

After installing the above, you will need to reboot your system by issuing the command:

shutdown -r now

Other Popular packages

You may also wish to install some of the following packages:

yum -y groupinstall "Internet Browser"

yum -y groupinstall "General Purpose Desktop"

yum -y groupinstall "Office Suite and Productivity"

Login Screen

After your reboot, your screen should be similar to the one in the example. Here you need to click on your local account and login with the password you created earlier.

GNOME Desktop

After you have logged in, you should now see your GNOME desktop and any of the additional software that you have installed.

KDE Login Screen

If you installed both desktop options GNOME and KDE, then you you will offered a choice of desktop to use. You can switch between either KDE or GNOME from the menu located at the bottom of the screen.

KDE Desktop

After you have logged in, you should now see your KDE desktop and any of the additional software that you have installed.