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I'm trying to benchmark the disk throughput of a base CentOS install on my lab XenServer setup, and am installing from the CentOS 6.4 minimal CD. However, the install ISO boots into a text-mode anaconda setup, which only offers me the option to next through some rudimentary setup steps.

From memory, I'm sure the full CD used to allow me to partition, choose mount points and filesystems, but is a massive ISO, with a lot of packages I will probably never use. This minimal one just offers "use the whole disk", "replace an existing linux" and "use free space" and then merrily goes off and creates an LVM volume group, root and data volumes, and formats both as ext4.

Benefits of LVM appreciated and not withstanding, I just want plain old MSDOS-labelled primary ext3 partitions for /boot and / (and possibly one more for /home).

Do I have to use the full CD for something so simple?

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From the CentOS 6.0 Release Notes:

4. Known Issues

The text installer has limited capabilities compared to the GUI installer. Most notably there is no support for configuring partition layout, storage methods or package selection. Please refer to the official documentation for details. Here you can find some useful information on creating and using kickstart files which can be used to perform advanced configuring without the need for the GUI installer.

However, you can use the GUI installer to do custom layouts.

References

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  • Can you get the GUI installer to run from the minimal ISO?
    – jimbobmcgee
    Commented Jan 24, 2014 at 20:36
  • @jimbobmcgee - I don't have a disc handy to confirm, I would check, I think you can but your target install system needs a minimum amount of RAM to do the install. Without this amount of RAM the installer defaults to text. The other way to approach this is to make a kickstart ks.cfg file and use that to drive the minimal install in terms of laying the disk out etc.
    – slm ♦
    Commented Jan 24, 2014 at 20:40
  • @jimbobmcgee - this tutorial would seem to indicate that you can do the install using minimal + GUI. geekpeek.net/how-to-install-linux
    – slm ♦
    Commented Jan 24, 2014 at 20:44
  • Then I guess this is a XenServer issue because, despite allocating 2GB+ to the VM, it is booting into text mode. Oh well.
    – jimbobmcgee
    Commented Jan 24, 2014 at 21:02
  • Found it: discussions.citrix.com/topic/… -- I need to add vnc to the advanced boot parameters, simply using the default graphical won't do it. It even describes my problem with disk partitioning!
    – jimbobmcgee
    Commented Jan 24, 2014 at 21:07

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