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I've installed CentOS 7 on a Dell PowerEdge R320. I did the minimal install and its starting up at the command line. Is there anyway to switch to the regular gui without reinstalling or a internet connection. I could load a file to a usb stick and go from there... Or would a complete re install be faster?

Robert
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2 Answers2

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It looks like you've installed the minimal CentOS install from the smallest ISO they have. In other words, you have the bare minimum you need to have a working system. For Linux gurus, this is called an OS. That being said, you have three options.

  • Option 1: Get the DVD ISO and install it with the GUI.
  • Option 2: Get the netinstall and don't forget to choose the Gnome Desktop Environment from the package list to install the GUI.
  • Option 3: Get internet connection on the system and simply install it using yum.

I would suggest going with option 3 as it is the easiest and possibly as simple as running

dhcpcd ens0p0

I would suggest checking the following link if your network is configured as DHCP.

Rui F Ribeiro
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Digisec
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a complete reinstall can be fast, from dvd onto an SSD I can do it in less than 1 hour: the first 5-10 minutes is booting dvd and getting through the install gui to the final ok click then about 20-30 minutes to install to the disk followed by the reboot and account & network setup and the little things. For the install you would choose server with gui or gnome desktop as opposed to "minimal install".

with a minimal install you are I think at runlevel 3 or now known as multi-user.target. To get to runlevel 5 full graphics you can do either init 5 or systemctl isolate graphical.target. However if you don't have that stuff installed, I don't know what would happen actually.

# this will return the current setting the OS runlevel is set to boot
# automatically.  I suspect a minimal install will put you to runlevel 3 having
# full network capability but no graphics which is systemd multi-user.target

systemctl get-default

# to set the runlevel to boot to full graphics full networking.

systemctl set-default graphical.target



# https://www.thegeekdiary.com/centos-rhel-7-how-to-install-gui/

# for an already installed system, have the centos7 install dvd (or usb)
 present as a repository so that you can basically carry on where the minimal
 install stopped.  You don't require networking to do this:

yum grouplist
yum groupinstall "Server with GUI"


# for a minimal install system this should work, but with the stuff you
# take for granted like networking, centos and EPEL repositories being
# available, not having to worry about dependencies and setting up repo's
# then a complete reinstall from dvd may be fast enough and less headache/risk.
ron
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