Installing packages

This section explains the bulk of the installation: downloading and installing software packages from your distribution’s repository.

Initialize the RPM database

To use RPM on the target system, run this command to initialize the RPM database:

rpm --root=/mnt/root --initdb

Download and install the release package

The release package, a package named like fedora-release or centos-release, contains files that provide information about available software repositories, and needs to be installed manually.

Note

In the examples below, replace fedora-release with the correct release package name for your distribution, if necessary.

1. Download the release package:

   yumdownloader fedora-release
   

2. Install the release package:

   rpm --root=/mnt/root --nodeps -ivh fedora-release-*.rpm
   

Release package names for common distributions

Distribution	Release package name
Fedora	fedora-release
CentOS	centos-release
Scientific Linux	sl-release

Install core packages

Install a minimal set of packages:

yum --installroot=/mnt/root install -y rpm yum bash grub passwd initscripts chkconfig

This will install everything necessary to boot your system, but it will be mostly useless. You will probably want to install some of these packages:

• Your text editor of choice, such as vim-enhanced
• openssh-server and openssh-clients
• rsyslog, to allow programs to write to /var/log/messages
• Packages to manage filesystems, such as e2fsprogs for the ext filesystem series
• dhclient, for getting a DHCP lease on a network
• mdadm, if you are using a RAID
• lvm2, if you are using LVM

Note

The kernel package is missing from the above list. This is intentional. It will be installed after some configuration files are created that the package needs to build the initrd.