Book Image

CentOS Quick Start Guide

By : Shiwang Kalkhanda
Book Image

CentOS Quick Start Guide

By: Shiwang Kalkhanda

Overview of this book

Linux kernel development has been the worlds largest collaborative project to date. With this practical guide, you will learn Linux through one of its most popular and stable distributions. This book will introduce you to essential Linux skills using CentOS 7. It describes how a Linux system is organized, and will introduce you to key command-line concepts you can practice on your own. It will guide you in performing basic system administration tasks and day-to-day operations in a Linux environment. You will learn core system administration skills for managing a system running CentOS 7 or a similar operating system, such as RHEL 7, Scientific Linux, and Oracle Linux. You will be able to perform installation, establish network connectivity and user and process management, modify file permissions, manage text files using the command line, and implement basic security administration after covering this book. By the end of this book, you will have a solid understanding of working with Linux using the command line.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Preparing to install CentOS 7

The CentOS community released its latest operating system version with the name CentOS 7.6-1810, where 7.6 comes from RHEL 7.6 and 1810 shows its release date (October 2018). CentOS 7.6 can be installed on physical or virtual hardware. You can use any of the main desktop virtualization software utilities, such as Oracle VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) or VMWare Workstation (https://www.vmware.com/products/workstation-pro/workstation-pro-evaluation.html), as per your environment. My choice for desktop virtualization software is VirtualBox as it is free, open-source, and easy to use. You will also need a working internet connection to download the CentOS image from the community download page.

Those are using Linux as their base operating system can also use KVM for virtualization.

Getting the right hardware

For a minimal installation of CentOS 7.6, the following hardware requirements must be met:

  • 512 MB RAM
  • 4 GB HDD space
  • A network card

However, to practice all the exercises described in this book, we recommend that the following hardware requirements are met:

  • 64-bit architecture support
  • 1 GB RAM
  • 10 GB HDD space
  • DVD drive or USB memory stick
  • A network card

Getting the software

There are different ways to get the software required to perform all the exercises in this book. However, the easiest and most flexible way is to download the iso file from the CentOS website and burn it to a DVD, or create a bootable USB drive with CentOS. Then, boot your PC using the ISO DVD image if you are using a virtual machine. If you are installing onto a physical system, then use a bootable USB drive or burned CentOS DVD for installation.

Use the following link to download the CentOS 7.6 (64 bits) ISO image file:

http://centos.mirror.net.in/centos/7.6.1810/isos/x86_64/CentOS-7-x86_64-DVD-1810.iso

You can download MD5 and SHA1 hashes of the image file downloaded from CentOS site. The downloaded image should have the same hash as the one posted on the CentOS website.

Finalizing server setup details

Once you have the right hardware and software for the CentOS installation, you should decide on the basic setup parameters to be specified while performing the installation. The following table lists the details we will use during the installation of our CentOS 7.6 server described in this chapter:

Setup parameter

Sample values

IP address

192.168.0.100

Netmask

255.255.255.0

Hostname

Server.example.com

Root password

Linux@12345

User name

Student

User password

Student@12345