CentOS MinimalCD 6.1 Release Notes

Last updated: December 31st 2011

1. Translations

Translations of these release notes are available for the following languages :

• Deutsch (de) - Christoph Galuschka

• Simplified Chinese (简体中文)

• Traditional Chinese (繁體中文)

• Spanish (Español)

2. Introduction

The CentOS Development team is pleased to announce the availability of the CentOS MinimalCD 6.1 for both i386 and x86_64 architectures. These disks are based on our CentOS-6.1 i386 and x86_64 distributions.

The aim of this disk is to install a CentOS 6.1 system which has a minimum of packages needed to have a functional system, with no compromise regarding security and fully network and yum aware. It also includes support for the storage systems available in CentOS 6.1 ( Adaptec, Brocade, QLogic, iSCSI and FCOE).

You can get the CentOS MinimalCD 6.1 from the CentOS mirrors:

32-bit

• i386: http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/6/isos/i386/

• Filename: CentOS-6.1-i386-minimal.iso
• Size: 291723264
• MD5Sum: 059fcb1a3757de74544e5f07e7c1fa49
• SHA1Sum: 89b0cb3cad239b55e3de74ec741738b8def45f30
• SHA256Sum: 07a86e905f4c389eb92d4e5a04d0a2c4e583dbcbf2243781107273117b31628c

64-bit

• x86_64: http://isoredirect.centos.org/centos/6/isos/x86_64/

• Filename: CentOS-6.1-x86_64-minimal.iso
• Size: 336857088
• MD5Sum: 03177dfefb4ebfeb03f457c29f00b0a1
• SHA1Sum: aecef89e8a6d0996e9aefb0001d5ae5fd8e408f1
• SHA256Sum: 971fb86182814c7a4e4712d37831a87a28611b5332af1efa6322b818ae6a0d48

3. Most Important Packages and Applications

4. Features

• SELinux aware ( targeted policy only)
• IPv6 aware
• Except for selection of packages (this step is automatically skipped), installation is identical to the CentOS 6.1 DVD.
• Full RAID, LVM, iSCSI, FCOE, encryption and multipath abilities, identical to the CentOS 6.1 DVD
• Once installed the system can be used as DHCP and NFS client
• Support for delta rpms
• Support for custom acl
• Any application from a yum repository compatible with CentOS 6.1 can be added after the system is installed.
• The x86_64 CD can be used for memory testing (at boot time only).

5. Known Issues

Just like the CentOS 6.1 DVD the text installer has limited capabilities compared to the GUI installer.

If installing as a virtual machine in VMWare, do not allow the "New Virtual Machine Wizard" to use the "Easy Install" (also known as "autoinstall") feature. It includes several incorrect defaults which create problems after the installation is finished. As a workaround, do the following at the Guest Operating System Installation step instead of choosing Installer disk image file (ISO):

1. select I will install the operating system later.

2. advance to Ready to Create Virtual Machine and select Customize Hardware

3. select the New CD/DVD (IDE) entry from the list of hardware devices

4. under the Connection field select Use ISO image and browse to your local copy of the minimalCD.iso

If you did not configure the network during installation:

• make sure that the interface is activated at boot time ( see the ONBOOT parameter in the interface configuration file ).

• if you are not using DHCP, you will have to manually configure your network interfaces because NetworkManager is not included. Documentation is here. Do not forget about DNS and default route.

logrotate can only be used manually as no cron daemon is included. If you want to automate its usage, please make sure that you have correctly configured access to CentOS repositories and use the command yum install cronie in order to install the crond daemon and all its dependencies ( http://bugs.centos.org/view.php?id=5075 ).