On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 6:36 PM, Grant Edwards <[email protected]> wrote:
> CentOS 7.0, however, was a mess. > > It took three attempts and almost an entire day of work. > > My first attempt was to use the "minimal" ISO image so that I would > have the option of burning a CD if needed (I can't burn DVDs at the > moment). That was a mistake. It was too minimal, and I couldn't get > the network working to the point where I could configure repositories > and install other stuff. Since the CentOS 7 ISO images all boot from > USB flash drive anyway, staying under the 700MB CD size limit was moot > anyway. > > Next I tried the net install ISO. I'm guessing I could have burned > the DVD image to USB drive, but all I want is a minimal desktop > system, so I figured why wait for a download of 3.5GB of stuff I don't > care about. > > It still didn't recognize the NVidia Ethernet controller on my > 5-year-old motherboard. After some cable swapping and futzing around, > I got the netinstall going using the Realtek NIC. > > Maybe I just got unlucky and picked a slow mirror site, but once I got > the install going, it ran for over 3 hours when installing a vanilla > Gnome desktop system. Compare that with a 15 minute download time for > a 700MB Xubuntu CD and then a 15 minute install. AFAIK, the netinstall isn't really meant to be used over the net but with a local mirror. > CentOS 7 refused to install the bootloader in a partition: your only > choices are MBR or nothing. When I manually installed grub legacy it > failed because I had stupidly allowed CentOS to use ext4, and the > build of Grub I had laying around didn't grok ext4. > > So I re-do the whole net install again using ext3 instead. > > Now, after manually installing Grub legacy in the CentOS 7 partition, > it boots up. The Anaconda developers have the same design philosophy as the Gnome developers: fewer options, fewer options, fewer options, fewer options, ... In this particular case, they're just following the grub developers' dislike of block lists; and the ext4 maintainer's described them as emotionally insecure because of that. > CentOS still doesn't recognize the NVidia motherboard Ethernet > controller. After Google finds me a pages full of links to other > people complaining about the exact same thing, I find out RedHat > decided that the NVidia forcedeth driver wasn't widely used enough to > deserve inclusion on an ISO image that was already 360+ MB. Thanks > for that, RedHat. So it takes another 45 minutes of faffing around > finding a third party src.rpm file for the forcedeth module and > installing it. [It was either that or build a kernel and initrd.] For future reference, elrepo.org is the best repo for RHEL issues like this one. For RH, dropping forcedeth means cutting its support costs.
