CentOS 7 “Live” media spins

Wednesday, 28, May 2014 Fabian Arrotin builds, desktop, Installation 21 Comments

As we're all busy building/testing/rebuilding/QA'ing/etc ... the el7 rc tree, I thought it would be a good idea to also start looking at building the Live media spins (aka CentOS LiveCD/LiveDVD we had for version 5 and 6).

The first thing was to rebuild the needed tools but that was easy to do (you can find the needed tools for the time being on http://people.centos.org/arrfab/CentOS7/LiveMedia/RPMS/ , but those will appear later in the Extras repository when there will be an official CentOS 7 tree on all mirrors). I decided to take another route for the C7 live spins. First point is the fact that with Gnome3, it was quite difficult to produce an iso file that could fit on a CD, but I did it : it's just a basic Gnome3 desktop (with the Classic theme) and the only application that I was really able to put (after having removed some other smallers apps/fonts packages) was Firefox. I guess it's a good candidate for people wanting to test "live" what CentOS 7 can be (and obviously it can still be installed on the hard disk, thanks to anaconda/liveinst.

Instead of having a bigger DVD containing both Gnome and KDE, I thought that splitting those into two smaller variants would be better, so that people don't have to download a bigger ISO file , testing something they don't want, and worst, installing on disk something they don't want to use (aka KDE vs Gnome).

If you're interested in the tools/kickstarts used to produce those live media spins (still be to really built when CentOS 7 Final will appear , so be patient ...), you can find it on the official git repository used by the CentOS Project : https://git.centos.org/summary/sig-core!livemedia.git or you can also fork/clone (and why not create a Pull Request on Github if you want to contribute !) : https://github.com/CentOS/sig-core-livemedia

 

21 thoughts on "CentOS 7 “Live” media spins"

  1. probono says:

    Please post the URL to download an ISO for 32-bit systems. Thanks!

    1. vlad says:

      no 32-bit for RHEL7 (and consequently centos) as far as I know

      1. Billy says:

        No way. Maybe there's no more i386 but not i686. It's still in the kernel.

        1. RHEL 7 only ships with a 64 bit kernel. There are still 32 bit libraries, etc, available, but the core OS is only available as 64 bit. Thus, there will likely be no 32 bit release of CentOS 7.

    2. Daniel says:

      Just curious: What would be the reason for wanting 32bit?

      1. 32bit apps are smaller both on disk and in memory which can be important for memory and disk constrained devices.

  2. Ivan D'hond says:

    Fabianske!
    Glad to see you at work on Centos 7
    Still running on Centos 6 (after a brief walkabout on Arch).
    When Centos 7 comes around, I'll be there!

    KasLaBarak!

    Ivan "Kusmijnvoet" D'hond

  3. Roby Gamboa says:

    Glad to hear C7 is coming along. Can't wait to see it! Question, though: will you also be providing a MATE LiveCD, for those of us who were horribly underwhelmed with the whole Gnome 3 experience?

  4. Andy says:

    First off, I want to say that I'm a huge fan of running CentOS on all of my web servers, both in dedicated and in VPS environments, and I have a lot of them as I'm a web project developer, web host and sysadmin.

    I've also ran, short-term, CentOS on my desktop to see how it felt and if I could feel as good about it on my desktop as I have always done on my servers, but it seemed that the app software was always a bit behind. That might have been fixable in some way back then that I wasn't aware of, especially as third-party repos are more widely available and more trusted now.

    This brings me to my concern of WANTING to run CentOS on the desktop because of the values that CentOS brings to the table, but I still need to be getting the latest desktop updates, whether they're Gnome, KDE, Xfce and MATE as well as the apps that I choose to install, as after all, it's a desktop in this scenario (not a server).

    With this in mind I'd like to ask the developers/maintainers of CentOS if they think that they can keep up with the pace of desktop environment updates and app updates when compared to the other side of the fence, that we all know and love as the Fedora Project.

    If CentOS as a desktop can do what Fedora's doing, and give that long-term support that we come to depend on with CentOS when compared to Fedora's rapid-release and 'fedup' update process.

    The question for me to ask is:

    "What can CentOS and what might CentOS bring to the 'desktop' table that Fedora isn't already doing?"

    I sincerely wish you guys all the desktop-success in the world, but having such a successful and trusted history on the server side, and fierce competition from other desktop-orientated distros out there, you've got high walls to climb.

    Good luck guys... keeps us all updated on what you're doing, and how you're doing.

    1. Josh says:

      @Andy: "With this in mind Iā€™d like to ask the developers/maintainers of CentOS if they think that they can keep up with the pace of desktop environment updates and app updates when compared to the other side of the fence, that we all know and love as the Fedora Project."

      Unfortunately, that is not the stated purpose of CentOS. CentOS aims to be binary compatible with RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and RHEL does not give you the latest packages. RHEL gives you the tried and true packages.

      I haven't upgraded Gnome or anything at that level from the third party repositories. But I do run the latest versions of Eclipse, LibreOffice, and other apps on my CentOS 6 laptop.

      1. Eric says:

        @Andy -
        As Josh says, CentOS isn't intended to be a bleeding-edge desktop release. If you want that, then use Fedora.

        If you want to use CentOS but have access to SOME Fedora packages, then check out the EPEL project at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL - Every Fedora package isn't in there, but a lot of them are.

        I have found that most of the RHEL 6 packages work just fine on RHEL 7 as well. Useful if you want xrdp or something that they haven't added to EPEL yet.

        1. Spike says:

          You must be psychic! That's exactly what I'm googling for, XRDP on RHEL7 (not in EPEL yet).

  5. Jules says:

    waiting for that step , i have used centos 6 on my laptop for 3 years now , going centos 7 is exciting .

  6. I'm not sure why a primarily workstation/server distro needs to fit on a single CD - won't people downloading it have fast net connections almost by default?

    Also, I personally don't think we need a 32-bit version of CentOS 7 at all for the same reasons as above - all new workstations/servers in the past 5 years are 64-bit capable. If you want to use a 32-bit CentOS distro on old kit, stick with CentOS 6 until 2020 if you must...

    1. keithpeter says:

      Most of the other popular Gnu/Linux distros release hybrid ISOs in the 1Gb up range these days (Debian Wheezy, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, OpenSuse &c). Most pages encourage the use of USB sticks for the live ISOs.

      So I'm also wondering what is magic about 700Mb?

      In terms of an evaluation of the desktop experience for managers/users/press, LibreOffice plus Shotwell/Rhythmbox/Totem/CUPS-with-drivers/Evolution seems about right to me and adds what 400Mb tops??

      1. andrew says:

        700MB is the size of a standard CD, so that's probably the "magic" behind that number. Any larger and you're forced to use a DVD or USB etc.

    2. keithpeter says:

      PS @Richard Lloyd I work down the road from your most recent case study. Small world. Nowt to do with Centos

      tata a bit

    3. ylos says:

      I aggree... As well, no 32 bits and keeping a live flavour designed to fit in an old CD, imo this is waste of time/energy.

      I'm eager to check if gnome-3 as tuned by rh/centos will at least be on par with good old gnome 2. In shell mode I find it almost unusable and I soon finds limits in alternatives like Xfce.

      Concerning no 32 bits, I think for rhel 8 it should have been done. But for 7 this was a mistake.

      Reason: XP end, with so much (we only got rid of 32 bits after core2 generation in 2007) machines that could have benefit of an up to date very stable distro.

  7. I love using Fedora 20, however, I would replace it with CentOS 7 as soon as possible! Keep doing good deeds! šŸ˜€

  8. Abr4cks says:

    I'm excited too. I have great success stories running CentOS 6 on my servers and also use as desktop (with some adjustments) and it serves me very well. Look forward to the CentOS 7.

  9. Binod Subba says:

    Hi friends, please anyone help me creating live CD of centos 7
    i m getting error
    Error creating Live CD : Unable to run ['/usr/bin/firewall-offline-cmd', '--enabled']!

    is any other link is there to create LiveCD..
    like this for centos 6
    http://gr360ry.github.io/blog/2013/11/28/building-custom-centos-6-dot-4-livecd-with-ansible/

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