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 😕

  1. Boot the Xfce Live CD
  2. Install as normal
  3. Once logged on, open a terminal and do the following:
    1. yum grouplist | head -n20
    2. yum groupremove installedgroup (Remove all except the following: Text-based Internet and System Tools)
  4. Cleanup some more stuff
    1. 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
  5. Install some essentials
    1. dhclient eth0 (didn’t want to do the static configuration yet)
    2. yum install -y yum-utils parted htop tmux screen
  6. Enable sshd
    1. systemctl start sshd.service
    2. systemctl enable sshd.service
    3. nano /etc/sysconfig/iptables /etc/sysconfig/ip6tables
      1. add: -A INPUT -m state –state NEW -m tcp -p tcp –dport 22 -j ACCEPT
  7. Update the system
    1. yum update -y
  8. 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.

One Reply to “Fedora 17 Minimal”

  1. 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 🙂

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