Fedora13 Questions (YUM & Static IP)

[rihatum]

Hi All,

Have just installed Fedora 13 under Virtual Box on Windows 7 (X86).

I have removed the "X Window System" by :

user@localhost$ sudo yum groupremove "X Window System"

Have edited the "/etc/inittab" to run level 3 (init3).

Now, I can get to the command line only on boot, when I ran "Yum update" it checked for all the X Window related packages too, like gnome, file manager, network manager, firefox etc.
I am just using this install as a DB (MySQL) server so don't need gui, also I am trying to get on with the command line, I have copied the fresh install VM as a template VDI and will be duplicating when I screw things up :-) Will be grateful for your assistance in my nix adventure.

Here are my Questions :

Q - 1 How can I tell Fedora / YUM not to check for any updates or packages related to X Windows ?

Q - 2 how can I assign a static IP Address to this command line version ?

Q - 3 Is there a way / script I can run on first boot of this VM (FC13) that it will make the dynamically assigned IP address, static in its network config ?

Will be grateful for your assistance on this.
Kind Regards
Rihatum

[smr54]

The easy way to do the static IP is system-config-network-tui

The tui stands for text user interface, and brings up a curses based configuration menu. I would that rather than worry about a script. (Fedora has several files related to Networking, it's a little overly complex--not in the sense you can't understand it, but in the sense of when compared to some other systems--whether there are actual advantages to the RH method, I have no idea, though manually configuring networking in say, the BSDs, is far simpler.)


As for completely eliminating X, this is untested, but should work, I think (someone probably has a better answer.)

In /etc/yum.conf put

exclude=xorg-*

[rihatum]

Hi smr54,

Thanks for your reply, tried editing the yum.conf and added the following combinations :

exclude=xorg
exclude=xorg*
exclude=xorg-*

on 3 different times and it still shows a list of updates (315 MB in size), i think it hasn't excluded them yet.

any help ?
Kind Regards

[rihatum]

Anyone ?
Still can't seem to find a way to exclude the GUI (GNOME) packages when I do a yum update or it will install everything back on.

or

is there a server (command line) version of Fedora 13 ?

Kind Regards

[markkuk]

"yum update" doesn't install any additional packages unless they are required as dependencies. If Gnome packages are listed as updates, then you have them already installed.

[smr54]

No, there's no server command line version. One can more or less make one by, at installation, unchecking EVERYTHING (or choosing minimal install if it's available as choice--not sure if it's in 13 or didn't show until 14).

You can also try excluding xorg on the command line and and also, (thanks markkuk, I should have mentioned this in my first post), excluding anything with gnome, but I'm not sure what the syntax would be for gnome, since often, the packages are are simply g(something).

However, if your original installation has no X packages, you might be able to do it that way. To undo it once it's done, however, will be more difficult. You can try doing something like rpm -qa >rpm.txt, then going through rpm.txt to see what includes X related packages, but there's no sure way that I know to figure that from package name, though many will, of course, be obvious.

There is, as far as I know, a server version of RH, though not of CentOS--a cursory google, however, doesn't indicate that it expects you to not run X. A friend who used to work at RH once told me they're very proud of all their GUI tools.

One can check an individual package with rpm -q -R package name, which will give the dependencies. Still it can be hard to tell. For example, trying it on fluxbox, which obviously needs X, had nothing about requiring xorg anything. Though if one installs it without xorg-server, or without the various input drivers, I suspect it wouldn't run very well. It also requires libx11 which is a pretty good hint.

[jpollard]

Quite frequently it is convenient to have the GUI tools on a server...

There is no requirement for xorg anything, as these tools will run just fine over
an ssh connection.

If you do manage to remove all the GUI tools... you must be able to edit all the
configuration files manually... and unfortunately, not all of them are documented,
or are documented poorly.

You might be able to exclude them if you remove all the X based libraries.
Most (if not all) depend on libX11.so*, so removing that one, and everything
that depends on it, just might remove them all.

Of course, you might get surprised by how much depends on X.