installing a CentOS system

Attention

By default, CentOS 7 installs the Minimal Install Base Environment, without a GUI. I recommend a KDE-based GUI. Under Base Environment, choose KDE Plasma Workspaces, and select all under Add-Ons for Selected Environment.

Warning

To run properly a virtual machine using VirtualBox, CentOS will need:

At least 1024 MB of memory to run correctly (2048 MB of memory may be too much).
At least 16 GB of disk space is necessary to correctly install updates.

After selecting an Installation Destination and making a Software Selection, select Begin Installation and, if necessary, create a user and set a root password.

Attention

If using the same password for user and root password, create the user first and the root password second, otherwise the installer may crash.

After rebooting, you will need to accept the EULA before continuing.

To install updates, use sudo yum check-update && sudo yum upgrade.

For CentOS 7, install officially supported programs with:

sudo yum install gedit gimp ImageMagick inkscape lynx recode tree

Attention

By default, CentOS 7 includes Python 2.7.5, which may need to be updated.

Additionally, some packages will need to be installed from the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) repository and the Nux Dextop repository. To enable access, use:

sudo yum install epel-release && sudo rpm -Uvh http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-5.el7.nux.noarch.rpm

Warning

Nux Dextop can coexist with EPEL, but any other repositories are likely to cause conflict.¹

Note

These repositories were chosen arbitrarily. Audacity was the first in an alphabetical list of programs I considered important to have in CentOS, and EPEL was the only repository I found with an Audacity package available. Better repositories may exist, I just haven't found any.

then install the following packages from EPEL:

sudo yum install audacity filezilla gparted grsync jq meld moreutils pandoc qbittorrent testdisk transmission uget

Note

The Audacity EPEL package does not include MP3 support unless ffmpeg is also installed from Nux Dextop.

and install the following packages from Nux Dextop:

sudo yum install ffmpeg kupfer vlc

Also install additional programs using more specific instructions:

licensing

No rights reserved: CC0 1.0.

prior work

The fact that a Minimal Install Base Environment is installed by default was introduced to me by an answer on Stack Exchange by Nasir Riley.
The method of enabling access to the EPEL and Nux Dextop repositories was introduced to me by a page on the Fedora Project Wiki and the My RPM repositories homepage.

https://li.nux.ro/repos.html ↩