Setting Up A Virtual Linux Web Server Part 3 : Installing CentOS 5

Filed under Web Hosting

Note : I am running a french version of Windows so the screenshots may show some french labels.

Now that your VMware server is installed and that your virtual machine is ready, let’s install CentOS 5. First of all, you will need to download the six ISO images from http://www.centos.org. At the time of this writing, I’ve downloaded the images from http://ftp.telus.net/pub/centos/5.0/isos/i386/

It is not necessary to burn all those images on CD as VMware can map a virtual CD to an ISO image.

First, let’s click on Edit virtual machine settings from our Red Hat Linux tab.

We need to map the virtual CD drive to the first CentOS ISO image.

Next we will be giving a little more RAM to our virtual machine. Let’s upgrade it to 512 MB.

When done, click OK and start the virtual machine so it will boot from the virtual CD.

At the startup screen, simply press Enter to install in graphical mode.

The next steps are really not technical so I’ll go over them quickly. These are the values I’ve selected but feel free to set your own selection if appropriate.

Testing Media CD Before Installation : Skip
Language to use during the installation process : English
Select the appropriate keyboard for the system : U.S. English

The installer will then tell you that the partition table on device SDA is unreadable and will offer you to initialize the drive. Answer “Yes”.

When asked about partitioning the hard drive, simply select “Remove linux partitions on selected drives and create default layout”.

Here are some other settings I will quickly go through :

Network Devices : DHCP (you can set a static IP address if you prefer)
Hostname : automatically via DHCP
Miscellaneous Settings : nothing to set unless you’ve set a static IP address.
Timezone : America/New_York
Root Password : set it to whatever you want the root password to be.

Now for the default installation packages, I’ve just checked the “Server” checkbox as the “Desktop – Gnome” was already selected.

If that were to be a full blown production server, I would’ve took the time to set the right package selection but this is only a test server so I won’t spend time on this. Now the installer will verify package dependencies, format the hard drive and then proceed to installation so that leaves you time to get a coffee (or two).

When asked to insert another disc, double-click on the cdrom drive icon at the bottom-right corner of the VMware window. Select the required ISO image and click OK.

You should be done installing by the fifth CD (depending on if you’ve selected some other packages). Now reboot your virtual machine, there is still some configuration to do.

Here are the settings I’ve used :

Firewall : I’ve disabled it since this test machine doesn’t need that much protection.
SELinux : Enforcing
Date and Time : Self-explanatory
Create User : Create a user account

Click “Next” until you’re done. You can now log on your brand new CentOS server with either your root or personnal user account.

Come back soon for more information on how to setup Apache, PHP and MySQL!

Share This Post