Fedora 17 Minimal
I have one Arch server left at home, it is behaving badly. It has some fairly new stuff on it so I can’t replace it with CentOS.
I should be able to replace it with a new Fedora. So I hunted for a minimal install image… nothing! Netinstall? Ofcourse not!
Fedora is a desktop OS, the idea that you don’t want a GUI seems alien to them 🙁
Oh well, nothing to do about it. Let’s give them what they want… then clean house. Hey it’s MY os!
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
rootfs 18G 1.9G 16G 11% /
What I did to get a minimal install with only a CLI and nothing fancy? Easy! Or maybe not 😕
- Boot the Xfce Live CD
- Install as normal
- Once logged on, open a terminal and do the following:
- yum grouplist | head -n20
- yum groupremove installedgroup (Remove all except the following: Text-based Internet and System Tools)
- Cleanup some more stuff
- yum remove -y NetworkManager-glib NetworkManager-gtk adwaita-cursor-theme adwaita-gtk2-theme adwaita-gtk3-theme avahi avahi-autoipd avahi-glib avahi-libs bluez-libs cheese-libs gnome-bluetooth-libs gnome-desktop3 gnome-menus gnome-themes-standard libX11 libX11-common libburn liberation-fonts-common libgphoto2 lm_sensors lm_sensors-libs mesa-dri-filesystem mesa-libGL mesa-libGLU mesa-libglapi mesa-libxatracker metacity xorg-x11-server-Xephyr xkeyboard-config xorg-x11-server-Xephyr xorg-x11-server-common xulrunner
- Install some essentials
- dhclient eth0 (didn’t want to do the static configuration yet)
- yum install -y yum-utils parted htop tmux screen
- Enable sshd
- systemctl start sshd.service
- systemctl enable sshd.service
- nano /etc/sysconfig/iptables /etc/sysconfig/ip6tables
- add: -A INPUT -m state –state NEW -m tcp -p tcp –dport 22 -j ACCEPT
- Update the system
- yum update -y
- Reboot
You now have a very small Fedora install without X Window System or a desktop environment. Just the way I like it.
Quick reference: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SysVinit_to_Systemd_Cheatsheet — I use systemd far to little.
I don’t recall with previous versions, but with Fedora 20 you can download the Fedora DVD (not the live iso’s) which grants you the option to do minimal installs. It’s a bit obscured since I had to drop to irc to find out 🙂