Installing CentOS 6.2 with VirtualBox

Getting Started #

Let us first build a playground where it is safe to experiment. We don’t want to clutter our physical machines so we are going to work on a virtual machine.

I have chosen VirtualBox because I did not know it and it is for free. There are others like VMWare or Parallels that I worked with, but the exercise is to keep your head fresh and learn something new.

We will spare the details of how to install VirtualBox, that is self-explanatory: Download the installer and execute it, at least on Windows 7 and MacOS.

Now we need an operating system. My choice came to CentOS 6.2. Why? Because it is free and I don’t like Windows for programming work. That is a pain in the a… unless you really have to, like for example C# developers. Don’t get me wrong Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server rocks, but it is about cost as well. So let’s keep things simple and stick to free stuff. I dont’t want to go into a discussion what environment is best. Most of the time it is not your choice, it is your clients choice instead, so be prepared. If you interview five developers they will give you 8 preferences for their favourite developing environment.

Operating System Installation #

After downloading the ISO-image (“CentOS-6.2-i386-minimal.iso”) from the CentOS download site, I have created a new VM in Virtual Box and installed CentOS 6.2. I left every installation option at its default.

When you are done with the installation and can finally login with your root user, the next step I had to take was configuring the network. In Virtual Box I have chosen “NAT”. In CentOS I had to change the configuration file

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

to insert the following lines at the end

BOOTPROTO="dhcp"
ONBOOT="yes"

You find the CentOS documentation for DHCP configuration here.

Upgrade Your System #

Next I have upgraded all already installed packages on my system by executing the following command

yum upgrade

Congratulations! We now have a working CentOS 6.2 system that we are going to use as our operating system blueprint.