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.