CentOS 6.2

Installation notes for CentOS 6.2 (updated to version 6.4 meanwhile) 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, ElRepo for nvidia closed source driver support as well as ATrpms and RPMforge. Adobe and Google add their own yum entries, but those are only for Acroread and Google Earth. I have also installed yum priorities in preparation for some havoc using EPEL.

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
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /usr/java/latest/bin/java 1
sudo update-alternatives --config java

Configure the Firefox Java plugin:

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so libjavaplugin.so \ 
/usr/java/default/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so 1
sudo update-alternatives --config libjavaplugin.so

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:

Download latest from http://www.libreoffice.org/download/, unzip and untar.

Install rpms for base install, help and language pack.

Set desktop integration

cd ~/Downloads/LibO_3.4.5rc2_Linux_x86_install-rpm_en-US/RPMS/desktop-integration/
sudo rpm -Uhv libreoffice3.4-redhat-menus-3.4-502.noarch.rpm

There are two errors from mkdir but it seems to work otherwise.

Compat libraries

sudo yum install compat-libstdc++-33.i686

Google Earth

Downloaded the most recent rpm from http://www.google.com/earth/download/ge/agree.html.

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

The yum entry apparently does not do upgrades to newer versions, the new and shiny release 6.2 had to be downloaded manually and installed like above.

Eclipse

Download latest from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

Unpack, run.

mplayer

Instead of the standard Gnome movie player, mplayer can be used (from atrpms).

ntfs

CentOS 6 comes without NTFS support, to install it, just add rpmforge and install fuse-ntfs-3g

sudo yum install fuse-ntfs-3g

There is a HOWTO in the CentOS wiki, but this seems to be a bit dated.

Tweaking

Legacy OSS games

You need to install openal-soft from the ATrpms repository first.

For the remaining settings, see Fedora_14_Linux#Legacy_OSS_games for the details.

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 [1] (basically add

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

to your /etc/X11/Xmodmap).

gpg-agent

Had some problems with Enigmail (version 1.5.1 on Thunderbird 17)

Error messages kept becoming more severe with update to CentOS 6.4 apparently (or I lost my temper finally):

Similar to the stuff described here:

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=140776

[DEBUG] enigmail.js: detectGpgAgent: gpg-connect-agent is executable
[CONSOLE] enigmail> /usr/bin/gpg-connect-agent
[ERROR] subprocess.jsm: got error from stdinWorker: expected type int, got (void 0)
[DEBUG] detectGpgAgent detection terminated with 256
[DEBUG] enigmail.js: detectGpgAgent: no running gpg-agent. \
Output='' error text='gpg-connect-agent: can't connect to the agent: IPC connect call failed'

See https://www.cafaro.net/2012/03/30/fixing-thunderbird-enigmail-gpg-agent-passphrase-cacheing-on-centosrhel-6/ for a good sollution, which actually worked well so far.