RHEL 7 beta "minimal" install
So, i looked at RHEL 7 Beta, and minimal seems to be anything but.
It would be nice to be able to actually get a minimal install with less than 400-500 rpms, especially in VM environments where each VM is hosting one application.
What I wouldn't give to have an enterprise distribution that gives me a simple Java JRE without all of the bloat, its not like we need 170 firmware/wifi/bluetooth/cups for a minimal installation of a server. Some days dealing with RHEL on a day-in-day-out basis makes me really appreciate what MirageOS is trying to do.
Responses
This is a great point, especially regarding the firmware packages. I forever seem to be weeding them out of my RHEL6 builds so disappointed to hear this is still happening in RHEL7.
A 'minimal' equivalent to the size of Debian's 'minimal' is something that needs to happen as people use Red Hat more and more to spin up VM's in 'cloud' environments. A base install through the manu driven installer with <200 packages is surely achievable!
I just carried out a minimal install through the RHEL 7 installer and there are 305 packages installed.
16 of the packages are iwl*firmware rpms for wireless cards, why are they getting dragged into the minimal install?
The anaconda-ks.cfg generated at install suggests only @core packages are selected.
Come on Red Hat, this is a joke.
You have support tickets dating back nearly 10 years asking for cruft like this to be removed from minimal installs. They've got my name on them.
I know others may disagree, but a minimal install shouldn't provide much more than the ability to boot up onto a wired network port and allow users to log in via ssh (suitably hardened of course).
The inclusion of wireless drivers, firmwares, bluetooth, etc is getting slightly farcical. At least LSB has been split to allow the graphical parts to be excluded. What use is wireless, bluetooth and the like in a virtualised datacentre?
On the customer side, we've all had to do a lot of work to pull the unnecessary packages out of RHEL 5 & 6. Please have a look at doing this for us with RHEL 7. It will make all your customers lives that bit simpler when looking at upgrading. You might even be able to call it a win-win?
Edit: I have been looking into RHEL7, but on a laptop install so far. Not got as far as trying minimum builds for virtual guests.
I'm interested in trying this via a kickstart, I think I'll try a kickstart using a modified kickstart I use for a minimalistic system load. I'll come back here with the results.. There's a part of me that wants to know if a minimalistic kickstart install would be different than a mimalistic GUI installer, I agree there 'should not' be. (does anyone already know this?)
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