CentOS 6 is finally deployed in my production setup!

The best article of 2011 yet, and possibly the entire decade, but who counts. Anyhow, I'm most gladly presenting this most enthusiastic review of the CentOS 6 deployment as a production operating system in my setup, including overview of reasons, installation attempt on internal and external disks on two machines, GRUB legacy and GRUB2 configuration, extra repositories, priorities, Nvidia proprietary driver installation, additional programs, Compiz effects, system usage, some tweaks, and more. Lovely jubbly, must see.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-desktop-cool.html


Cheers,
Mrk

 

That's a juicy good review of what you have done. Just one question asked before here concerning those pesky repo priorities.
According to the CentOS wiki one should not use both protectbase and priorities, but if you have had plain sailing maybe this no longer applies ?

NVidia drivers also available from elrepo (kmod-nvidia) which do not require recompiling, but I suppose you prefer to obtain the drivers from their site.

 

Ocky take all words out of my mouth

but one thing i miss in your review which may be not necessary but if there really appreciated

thats

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=306495

 

Didn't know about the driver in elrepo, worth examining. Thanks!
As to conflicts, I didn't find any, so it looks good.
And I'll think of a dock.
Mrk

 

but in kmod-nvidia you find old one 275 not 280

also if you planing to install virtualbox you need a DKMS(Dynamic Kernel Module Support) and gcc before install vbox it give no error

 

im surprised at having to manually disable Nouveau before using proper nvidia drivers is still an issue. i forgot to disable Nouveau in fedora 11 and ended up not being able to boot.

 

kmod-nvidia-280.13-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm is in the elrepo testing repository, so it shouldn't be too long a wait to be swept to stable.

 

i am never creazy about latest old and stable always welcome for me
even in fedora we get pretty same drivers i mean old ones

also still using firefox 3.6.22 and loving it

dont know how to peep cache files in firefox 6....etc

by the way is centos 6 going to be distro of 3rd quarter 2011

also like to thanks mrk for another great review + pointing out to

ctrl-alt-backspace X server reset

i didnt know about it )

for more i read that

http://deviceguru.com/enabling-ctrl-alt-backspace-to-kill-the-x-server-in-ubuntu/

 

If you plan to install a proprietary video driver, then it might help to select second option in the boot menu of the installation DVD (native video driver, if I remember correctly)

And when you boot with the latest kernel (after updating) it might be a good idea to regenerate a nouveau free initrd:

Code:

# mv /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img /boot/initrd-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
# mkinitrd /boot/initrd-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Also "nomodeset" added to the kernel options in the GRUB menu seems to to the trick.

My experience with CentOS 6 is that my laptop with poor cooling design runs coolest compared to other (newer) distro's. It even takes a while before the fan spins.

 

In SL6.1 I use the latest Nvidia stable release (280.13) to install the driver then I use DKMS to update the driver when a kernel change occurs. The whole procedure is not too difficult. The only thing I haven't looked into yet is how to update the driver when a new stable release appears.

Later...

 

Hey wilbertnl,
i dont acually have fedora/centos on a machine with an nvidia GPU atm but thanks for the feedback anyways.

you lose alot of features of the gpu if you dont install the proper drivers so I would of thought it would of been easy to install the proper drivers by the time it got in to RHEL.

other distros have easy and reliable methods to install proper GPU drivers such as ubuntu,opensuse,mandriva to name a few.

 

I failed to find which option is used to install CentOS 6?
On a desktop I selected from the first DVD the "Desktop" option, on a music server I selected "minimal" and on a laptop I selected also "minimal" and did an after-installation of the Desktop Environment.

CentOS has it's software grouped in packages and I manage them with yum grouplist | groupinfo | groupinstall (read "yum help")

When I do a yum grouplist on my desktop, it shows which groups are installed. That list contains support for all kinds of languages that I never heard of before. So I removed these languages and the list looks like this:

Code:

Installed Groups:
   Base
   Debugging Tools
   Desktop
   Desktop Debugging and Performance Tools
   Desktop Platform
   Dial-up Networking Support
   Directory Client
   E-mail server
   Electronic Lab
   Fonts
   General Purpose Desktop
   Graphical Administration Tools
   Hardware monitoring utilities
   Input Methods
   Internet Applications
   Internet Browser
   Java Platform
   Legacy UNIX compatibility
   Legacy X Window System compatibility
   Milkymist
   NFS file server
   Network Infrastructure Server
   Network file system client
   Networking Tools
   Office Suite and Productivity
   Optional packages
   Performance Tools
   Perl Support
   Print Server
   Printing client
   SNMP Support
   Scalable Filesystems
   Server Platform
   Web Server
   X Window System

There are probably a few items that I wonder I would need,
but my point is: if you want to select the packages yourself, just install minimal and after reboot launch:
# yum groupinstall Base "General Purpose Desktop" Desktop Fonts "X Window System" (etc...)

 

I would like to bring to your attention the 'continuous release ( CR ) repository' which gets installed with the command:

Code:

# yum install centos-release-cr

After updating the system, I notice the 6.1 kernel (2.6.32-131.17.1.el6) and of course lots of updates. I assume that this repo enables the users to run CentOS 6.1 while waiting for the iso to be released.

In case you use the yum protectbase plugin, you need to add protect=1 to the CentOS-CR.repo.
(Also reduce your download bandwidth with yum-presto!)