I am trying to set up a Django application running in production where the OS is Redhat. Before pissing off the system admin, I need to test all the possible catastrophic tweaks on a sandbox. You can either start a Redhat virtualbox on the cloud like AWS or you can maybe run a CentOS for your local virtualbox, which is what I am going to try.

If you go the CentOS website, you will realize the existences of tons of different downloadable images.

Here is a very good explanation of what are those images for, I am planning to start with the minimal image which is 395MB about 10% of the size of CentOS DVD 1 and 2 :).

The installation is pretty straight forward, you need to mount the ISO to the virtualbox and make sure you boot from CD first instead of harddrive, then just follow the installation.

In the end, you probably have to log in as user “root” and then you had better create a new user by adduser and passwd, otherwise, CentOS won’t be able allowing root to even start a GUI.

After I am done with the installation, the network had a hiccup which I resolved thanks to this post. I just need to change the nm_manager from yes to no and then yum will work properly.

After ‘yum groupinstall desktop’, you will be able to see a pretty ghetto desktop that doesn’t have a high enough resolution to fit your 24+ in monitor.

Next, you need to ‘insert guest additions’ and then the resolution will change to whatever resolution as you scale your screen.

However, the last thing to worry about is the text in terminal is a bit f* up, I posted a question on stackexchange and fingers crossed someone gonna answer it.

The total installation including goolging and debugging took my girl friend about half an hour with my help.