As a System Administrator, I often inherit Linux systems which were installed by someone else.
In some cases, these systems were installed with too many unnecessary packages — there is no need to run Gnome and Xwindow on a webserver, for example.
The RedHat and CentOS installers allow you to install multiple related packages by using “Package Groups”. A Package Group named “GNOME Desktop Environment” contains the dozens of RPMs and dependencies needed to install Gnome, including dependencies like the X window system.
With the worst cases, the former Sysadmin had no idea what they needed and simply selected all package in the installation GUI.
These packages need to be cleaned up.
Since this is a webserver and a headless machine, I can’t exactly fire up Gnome to view and remove packages using the convenient GUI. This is a headless machine, so my tools are SSH and the commandline.
Luckily, the Yum package manager includes a way to remove the “Package Groups” from the commandline. “yum grouplist” will show all installed and available package groups. To remove all GNOME packages on your system, simply run ‘yum groupremove “GNOME Desktop Environment”‘.
This is explained more in the “Managing Software with yum” guide, provided at centos.org .
-= Stefan
in reference to:
“su -c ‘yum groupremove “MySQL Database”‘”
- Managing Software with yum (view on Google Sidewiki)
Tags: linux sysadmin