I recently need to setup a CentOS 6.4 vm for development Java development. I wanted to be able to run Eclipse STS and on said vm and display the X11 Windows remotely on my Windows 7 desktop via XMing. I saw no reason for the CentOS VM to have a local X11 server. I’m quite comfortable with the Linux command line. I decided to share briefly on how to go from a CentOS minimal install to something actually useful for getting work done.
- /usr/bin/man The minimal install installs man pages, but not the man command. This is an odd choice.
yum install man
will fix that. - vim There is a bare bones install of vim included by default that is only accessible via vi. If you want a more robust version of vim,
yum install vim
. - X11 forwarding You need the xauth package and fonts.
yum install xauth
will allow X11 forwarding to work.yum groupinstall fonts
will install a set of fonts. - A terminal for absolute minimal viability
yum install xterm
will give you a terminal. I prefer terminator, which is available through rpmforge. - RpmForge (now repoforge) Centos is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Therefore it focuses on being a good production server, not a developer environment. You will probably need rpmforge to get some of the packages you want. The directions for adding Rpmforge to your yum repositories are here.
- terminator This is my terminal emulator of choice. One you added rpmforge,
yum install rpmforge
- gcc, glibc, etc Honestly, you can usually live without these if you stick to precompiled rpms, and you’re not using gcc for development. If you need to build a kernel module,
yum install kernel-devel gcc make
should get you what out need.
From here, you can install the stuff you need for your development environment for your language, framework, and scm of choice.