Red Hat Enterprise (Standard) GUI

[MaverickZA]

Hi There guys,

I am a complete novice when it comes to Linux, I am renting a VPS server in Germany, it has Red Hat Enterprise (Standard). It is a very very slimmed down version and doesn't have most features. There is no GUI, so I don't see anything when I connect via VNC. How do I go about installing a GUI so I can actually have a close to experience (dare I say it) Windows. I had a ex Linux server admin look at it and this is what he told me, he said its a very complicated procedure to install the GUI for Red Hat and now I am asking here for a second opinion on how I can go about doing it?

Thanks for any answers.

[saivin]

Do you have root (administrator) access to the server? In that case,

yum groupinstall "GNOME Destkop Environment"

should install GNOME.

[MaverickZA]

Hi There, yes I do have admin rights/root access. I typed in what you said with Inverted comma's. If I was supposed to ? :s

Anyway this is what it returned:

usage: yum [options] < grouplist, localinstall, groupinfo, localupdate, resolvedep, erase, deplist, groupremove, makecache, upgrade, provides, shell, install, whatprovides, groupinstall, update, groupupdate, info, search, check-update, list, remove, clean, grouperase >

options:
-h, --help show this help message and exit
-t, --tolerant be tolerant of errors
-C run entirely from cache, don't update cache
-c [config file] config file location
-R [minutes] maximum command wait time
-d [debug level] debugging output level
-e [error level] error output level
-y answer yes for all questions
--version show Yum version and exit
--installroot=[path] set install root
--enablerepo=[repo] enable one or more repositories (wildcards allowed)
--disablerepo=[repo] disable one or more repositories (wildcards allowed)
-x [package], --exclude=[package]
exclude package(s) by name or glob
--obsoletes enable obsoletes processing during updates
--noplugins disable Yum plugins

[deakons]

Do you have root (administrator) access to the server? In that case,

yum groupinstall "GNOME Destkop Environment"

should install GNOME.

This is the correct command, but you need to do this with single quotes.

yum groupinstall 'GNOME Desktop Environment'

Yes, yum can be picky at times.

[MaverickZA]

Thank you for your reply - now it did something different.

[root@km23118-07 ~]# yum groupinstall 'GNOME Desktop Environment'
Loading "rhnplugin" plugin
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
This system is not registered with RHN.
RHN support will be disabled.
Setting up Group Process
Setting up repositories
rpmforge                  100% |=========================| 1.1 kB    00:00
utterramblings            100% |=========================|  951 B    00:00
Setting up repositories
Reading repository metadata in from local files
Warning: Group GNOME Desktop Environment does not exist.
No packages in any requested group available to install or update

If I need to register with RHN, is there anyway around that? The guys that are hosting my server haven't given my a subscription for Red hat so i cannot register for that service. Please advise

Thank you.

[MaverickZA]

So how do I get around this?

Warning: Group GNOME Desktop Environment does not exist.
No packages in any requested group available to install or update

[deakons]

It seems that either the group of 'GNOME Desktop Environment' is the incorrect name or your host provider does not have the repo enabled for Gnome installation.

yum grouplist

Execute this to see if the group for the install of GNOME is present, if not you will have to enable a repo that enables this group.

[MaverickZA]

Hi there

This is all it says:

[root@km23118-07 ~]# yum grouplist
Loading "rhnplugin" plugin
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
This system is not registered with RHN.
RHN support will be disabled.
Setting up Group Process
Setting up repositories
rpmforge 100% |=========================| 1.1 kB 00:00
utterramblings 100% |=========================| 951 B 00:00
Done


Does this mean I don't have the GNOME repo? Where can I get a GNOME repo and how do I go about adding it?

[MaverickZA]

This is wierd, my email says that there is a reply but its not here ? Anyway is there anyone else that can help me with this problem?

[deakons]

It looks like the provider has disabled/removed the standard repositories for RHEL. You will have to find out (/etc/redhat-release) what version of the OS you are using and search for the standard repositories (rhel(version)-base). This should enable you to perform the installation via the groupinstall method.