CentOS 6.2

Installation notes for CentOS 6.2 on my AMD Athlon64 X2 5000+. You can find more complete Howtos on the Net, so I won't repeat this here.

Download

Via one of the ftp mirrors. I downloaded the 32 bit live-CD. Burn, done.

Basic install

As with my previous Linux installations, I did not do an update but a complete reinstall. I just scraped the existing FC14 installation, keeping the home-directories and manually installed software.

CentOS refuses to install on an ext3 volume, and requires an ext4 partition. Moving an existing ext3 to ext4 is easy though:

tune2fs -O extents,uninit_bg,dir_index /dev/<your_ext3_partition>
e2fsck -pf /dev/<your_ext3_partition>

Afterwards, the data is still there and in the right format.

Installation worked nice, setup was more or less OK except for one BIG FAT BUG:

The LiveCD somehow misses to advertise the fact, that the partition chosen for installation is completely wiped in the process, even if you do not format it.

This may be written in small print somewhere, but should appear in big, fat, red letters prior to pressing OK for the installation (which apparently did not happen). This is especially evil, because a conventional install does not wipe the partition.

Fortunately I had a backup.

Additional repositories

A good list can be found on the CentOS wiki website.

For now I enabled the CentOS Extras and Plus repositories and ElRepo for nvidia closed source driver support.

nVidia closed source drivers

Can be installed by means of the ELRepo repository.

sudo rpm --import http://elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org
sudo rpm -Uvh http://elrepo.org/elrepo-release-6-4.el6.elrepo.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install kmod-nvidia

If you have other third-party repositories enabled, you may need to select elrepo explicitly

sudo yum --disablerepo=\* --enablerepo=elrepo install kmod-nvidia

Oracle Java

CentOS comes with OpenJDK support. If you want the red pill, go to http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/jdk-7u2-download-1377129.html (current version) and download the appropriate rpm package (in this case the 32bit JDK package for development, not only the basic JRE).

After installation it needs to be configured as the default choice in case you also have OpenJDK installed in parallel

sudo rpm -Uhv jdk-7u2-linux-i586.rpm
update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/latest/bin/java 1
update-alternatives --config java

Skype

You can install the rpm for Fedora 13+.

sudo rpm -Uhv skype-2.2.0.35-fedora.i586.rpm

Truetype fonts

Downloaded from mjmwired.

sudo rpm -Uvh msttcore-fonts-2.0-3.noarch.rpm

Flash

sudo rpm -ivh http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/adobe-release/adobe-release-i386-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm --import /etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-adobe-linux
sudo yum install flash-plugin

LibreOffice

Following the howto on if !1 0:

FIXME

Google Earth

Downloaded the most recent rpm from [1]

sudo yum install redhat-lsb.i686
sudo rpm -Uhv google-earth-stable_current_i386.rpm

Tweaking

Legacy OSS games

FIXME.

Cyborg R.A.T. 5 mouse

Got a new mouse recently (the old one was unsatisfactory, despite being expensive), which turned out to have issues with Linux. Doh.

The X11 desktop did not recognize mouse clicks roughly 30% of the time.

This could be fixed by Googling as per [2] (basically add

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 0 0 0

to your /etc/X11/Xmodmap).