Installing CentOS 6 - part1

I managed to get a server from e-waste and I'm trying to setup a virtual-box kind of server so I can run some virtual machines.

Its spec is very tight with just 2GB of RAM to spare so I have chosen to use XFCE as the desktop environment.
I going to keep track of what I do in this post and the following ones.

1. Downloaded latest version CentOS 6.2 from a UK mirror:

http://www.centos.org/modules/tinycontent/index.php?id=34

I chose the minimal install ISO so I can go step by step and just have the bare minimum software needed for virtualbox to run smooth.

I burned the ISO and run through the installed just selecting the option to wipe out the whole disk, I'm not interested in disk partitioning this time around.

2. Configured network:

a) Edited the network script for eth0 so it uses dhcp

vi /etc/sysconfig/netowrk-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

Added the following lines so eth0 is enabled at boot and it uses dhcp client to get IP address:

ONBOOT="yes"

BOOTPROTO="dhcp"

b) Restarted the network service

/etc/init.d/network restart

3. Installed some additional packages

yum groupinstall base

4. Installed XFCE thanks to the epel extra yum repositories
 http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/fedora-sl-centos-redhat6-enable-epel-repo/

a) Got the yum repository updated thanks to this RPM package:
epel-release-6-6.noarch.rpm

That was the last version of the package I found available in the following web site so I had to modify a bit the instructions.
http://mirror01.th.ifl.net/epel/6/i386/repoview/epel-release.html

wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-6.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh epel-release-6-6.noarch.rpm

b) Installed the group package xfce

yum groupinstall xfce

I'll setup X and set XFCE as default desktop environment tomorrow...