Often people try and dissuade you from installing CentOS onto a laptop because they say the chipsets on the laptops are so varied it’s likely you will end up unable to use your laptop because the drivers aren’t there. Well, I don’t know if it’s because this netbook is so old (I mean, netbooks as a category don’t exist anymore - having been supplanted by tablets) or just uses common chipsets, but when I ended up with some Fedora configuration error that I didn’t want to bother debugging (I hate using the netbook on an everyday basis because the keys are too small and the screen is pretty low resolution), I figured it’d be a fun time to test if I could install CentOS on there. During the installation GUI the trackpad worked fine and WiFi connected just fine as well. So if you’ve still got one of these lying around and prefer the longer support windows of CentOS / RHEL - feel free to install CentOS on there.

Continuing my LXC project, let’s list the installed containers:

lxc-ls

That just shows the name of the container - lemmy. For completion’s sake, I’m going to start it as a daemon in the background rather than being sent straight into the console:

lxc-start -n lemmy -d

As per usual Linux SOP, it produced no output. Now to jump in:

lxc-console -n lemmy

That told me I was connected to tty1, but did not present a login. Quitting out via Ctrl-a q let me go back to the VM’s tty, but trying again did not get me login. There’s some weird issue that doesn’t allow it to work, however, this did:

I’m continuing on from yesterday’s post to get the VM ready to host LXC. I’m starting with Centos 7 so the first thing I had to do was enable the epel repos:

yum install epel-release

Then, according to the guide I was following, I had to also install these package:

 yum install debootstrap perl libvirt

That installed a bunch of stuff. I also get that they’re trying to break out what they’re doing, but they probably could have installed both that and the LXC stuff below in one blow:

As I mentioned before, I’m looking at Linux Containers (LXC) to have a higher density virtualization. To get ready for that, I had to create a network bridge to allow the containers to be accessible on the network.

First I installed bridge-utils:

yum install bridge-utils -y

After that, I had to create the network script:

vi /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-virbr0

In there I placed:

DEVICE="virbr0"
BOOTPROTO="static"
IPADDR="192.168.1.35" #IP address of the VM
NETMASK="255.255.255.0"
GATEWAY="192.168.1.1"
DNS1="192.168.1.7"
ONBOOT="yes"
TYPE="Bridge"

Then, since my ethernet on this machine is eth0

People often recommend using CentOS for your desktop machine if you find Fedora’s pace to be too fast. Does this even make sense? I decided to explore the idea of CentOS 7 as a desktop computer using my wife’s requirements as the benchmark. Why? Because my wife likes long term support distros. What’s more long term support than Red Hat/CentOS’s 10 years of support for each version?

https://youtu.be/1eYBgqAsEdU