Your Next Steps

The root password, which is configured during the installation, is required for accessing the system as the root user. Without the root password you will not be able to configure your system or install additional software. If you lost or forgot your root password, you can reset it by following the steps described in Resetting the Root Password.

Usually, drivers for system devices are already supported in the kernel provided by CentOS. However, occasionally, support for devices that have been released recently can be missing. In these cases, a driver update enabling your device might be available.

Devices necessary to complete the installation can have driver updates provided before the installation begins. If a device is missing a driver, but it is not essential during the installation, it is recommended to wait until after the installation completes, and install additional drivers afterwards. For instructions on installing and enabling additional drivers on the installed system using RPM and Yum, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator’s Guide.

In most cases network access is configured during the installation process, either in the installation program or in a Kickstart file. For information on configuring the network after the installation, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Networking Guide.

Kdump is a kernel crash dumping mechanism. If your system encounters a significant error, Kdump can save the contents of the system’s memory into a kernel crash dump, which can then be analyzed to find the cause of the error.

Kdump can be enabled during the installation process (see Kdump (x86)). It can also be configured at any time afterwards. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Kernel Crash Dump Guide provides all information necessary to understand how Kdump works and how to configure it on your system.

For the initial configuration of cloud instances, you can use the cloud-init package. On a new cloud instance, cloud-init can automatically:

After the installation is complete, you should perform an initial system update. During this process, all installed packages are updated to their latest available versions. Updates to packages provide security fixes, bug fixes and enhancements.

In CentOS, the Yum package manager is used for updating the installed packages. For more information about updating your system with Yum, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator’s Guide.

New software is installed from package repositories. Package repositories are organized sets of software and metadata that can be accessed by the Yum package manager. The basic update repositories are configured automatically and you can install updates and additional software from those. However, if you want to set up additional repositories, for example containing your own software, some extra steps are needed.

For information about configuring additional software repositories, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator’s Guide.

You can control which packages will be installed by selecting an environment in the Software Selection dialog in the graphical installation. This dialog does not provide a way to choose individual packages, only predefined sets. However, you can use the Yum packages manager to install additional packages after the installation. See the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator’s Guide for more information.

Depending on the options you chose during the installation process, it is possible that your system does not have a graphical interface, instead offering only a text-based prompt. If this is the case and you want to enable a graphical desktop after the installation, you must install the X Window System and your preferred desktop environment (either GNOME or KDE).

As with all other software, these packages can be installed using the Yum package manager. For information about using Yum to install new packages, see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 System Administrator’s Guide. For information on how to enable graphical login by default, see Booting into a Graphical Environment.

The default desktop environment in CentOS 7 is GNOME 3 which provides GNOME Shell and GNOME Classic user interfaces. It is possible to customize these interfaces by enabling and disabling GNOME 3 extensions. See the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Desktop Migration and Administration Guide for more information.