CentOS - Aug 2021 - Minimising a CentOS installation

On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 11:17:11 -0400
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Aug 2021 at 10:25, Anand Buddhdev <anandb at ripe.net>
wrote:
> >
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > After doing a minimal CentOS 8.4 installation, I found the following
> > packages to be useful for a simple server, so I removed them:
> >
> > cronie-anacron (replaced with cronie-noanacron)
> > alsa-firmware
> > ivtv-firmware
> > iwl*-firmware
> > sssd-common (along with all packages that depended on it)
> >
> > What other things do folk usually remove to make their installation
> > smaller? 
> 
> Usually it breaks down at this point because everyone has different
> things they want for their minimal install. Getting 3 people to agree
> on a minimal working set seems to be harder than doing a three body
> physics problem :).
Exactly.  To me a minimal install has just enough to run sshd, an
editor*, and yum.  It?s not very useful, so then I add diagnostics,
logging and management software, and it is no longer minimal.

My typical approach is to run `package-cleanup --leaves --all` or `yum
leaves` (might need software not on CentOS 8) and justify everything
that is there.  I have about 85 leaf packages on a CentOS 7 web
server, so a minimal package set should be smaller.  Experiment with a
disposable VM so it is easy to recover from mistakes.

Jim

* vi, or emacs, or ...

On Fri, 2021-08-20 at 22:10 -0600, James Szinger wrote:
> My typical approach is to run `package-cleanup --leaves --all` or
> `yum
> leaves` (might need software not on CentOS 8) and justify everything
> that is there.  I have about 85 leaf packages on a CentOS 7 web
> server, so a minimal package set should be smaller.  Experiment with
> a
> disposable VM so it is easy to recover from mistakes.
Thanks for this. I did a little searching and found this page:


https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-remove-orphaned-packages-on-centos-linux

It worked for me:

Get a list of orphaned packages:

$ package-cleanup --leaves

Remove them:

# yum remove `package-cleanup --leaves`

That's only if you're OK removing all of them.