How to Create a CentOS 7 Minimal VM on VMware Player

By popular request, here is an updated (for CentOS 7) version of an older tutorial for CentOS 6. This post provides step-by-step instructions how to:

• create a VMware virtual machine from a CentOS-7.0-1406-x86_64-Minimal.iso using VMware Player 6.0.4 on Windows 7;
• bring the virtual machine to a minimally usable state, i.e. to be able to connect to CentOS mirrors in order to update your new system and install additional software packages;
• install VMware Tools 9.6.2 or open-vm-tools 9.4.0;
• open ports with firewall-cmd.

How to Create a CentOS 6 Minimal Virtual Machine with VMware Player

UPDATE: This tutorial was written for CentOS 6. Creation of a CentOS 7 minimal virtual machine is very similar, but there are some differences. For CentOS-7-specific instructions, see CentOS 7 Minimal on VMware Player.


Today, a lot of pre-built VM images for specific purposes (e.g., LAMP, Drupal, Moodle, Joomla, etc.) are available. They can save a ton of time since you don't have to start from scratch (assuming, of course, that the images come from a reputable source). However, bear in mind that whoever builds those images always makes certain assumptions. For example, it is almost always assumed that in a LAMP stack the web server and the database server should be on the same virtual machine, which may or may not be what you want. Of course, you could take two identical LAMP images, remove the MySQL-related software packages from the first and all the Apache-PHP-related packages from the second and make the two work together. Still, starting from scratch is also an option, and in some cases (when the requirements of your application are very unique) the best option.

There may be a whole bunch of specific reasons why one would want to start with a minimal installation of an operating system, so I am not going to speculate about those, but, generally speaking, it allows to avoid software bloat and, therefore, maximize utilization of resources and reduce security risks. Bear in mind that minimal installs of most Linux distributions are just that - just enough OS to boot the system or slightly more. So, in order for it to actually do something useful, you will have to install additional software (again, what software to install depends on your specific needs, of course).


This post provides step-by-step instructions how to

• create a VMware virtual machine from a CentOS-6.4-x86_64-minimal.iso (or CentOS-6.4-i386-minimal.iso) using VMware Player 6.0.1 on Windows 7;
• bring the virtual machine to a minimally usable state, i.e. to be able to connect to CentOS mirrors in order to update your new system and install additional software packages;
• install VMware Tools 9.6.1.

Other versions of the software involved in all this may require slightly different steps, but the general principles are the same.

The Latest Ain't Always the Greatest... Revisited

A few years ago, I posted The Latest Ain't Always the Greatest about upgrading applications for no real reason. Today, I would like to look at updating your Windows OS and whether it is really such a good thing to do.

Apache and Skype: Yet Another Reason to Keep Things (Virtually) Separate

I rarely use my always-on Windows desktop for anything other than office type of stuff, an occasional blog post, and communication. Still, when I am too lazy to boot up another machine (physical or virtual) for a quick test or something like that, I may run some web applications on it.

I guess, today was one of those "lazy" days. So, I started MySQL. No problem. Then, I tried to start Apache 2.2. It showed me the usual
The Apache2.2 service is starting.....
and then, all of a sudden, gave me this error message:
The Apache 2.2 service could not be started.
A service specific error occurred: 1.
More help is available by typing NET HELPMSG 3547.

Getting Your Feet Wet with AWS - Part 2: Connect to Amazon EC2 Instance via SSH

In Part 1 of this tutorial, we created an Amazon EC2 instance using a pre-built minimalist AMI. In other words, we created a remote virtual machine from a "disk image" with just enough of Linux operating system (plus some applications) for it to boot up and run, and for us - to be able to remotely administer it over a secure connection.

Getting Your Feet Wet with AWS - Part 1: Create Amazon EC2 Instance

Although this tutorial was written with an absolute beginner in mind, some general computer knowledge is required in order to complete it.


On a very basic level, AWS (Amazon Web Services) is fairly easy to use. However, if you are totally new to virtualization, at first, it may be somewhat confusing primarily because the documentation, although quite extensive, is, for the most part, not written for the "uninitiated".

Luckily, Amazon offers one year of AWS for free. The free offer includes: one micro instance of Amazon EC2 (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud) and one micro instance of Amazon RDS (Amazon Relational Database Service). As the word "micro" implies, these are not computing powerhouses, but they are enough for anyone, even without advanced computer knowledge, to "poke around" and figure out the basics of how they work and how to manage them.

T-Mobile's MobileLife Contacts App Disabled, Finally!

Among other things that are beyond the scope of this post, T-mobile is known for slapping mostly useless, extremely annoying, often intrusive, and always poorly implemented applications onto mobile phones. MobileLife Contacts is, quite possibly, one of the worst I have seen so far in that it is all of the above plus very hard to get rid of. I could go on ranting, but, I guess, you just want to know how to uninstall the "pest".

How to Start and Stop PostgreSQL Service (Actually, Any Service) on Windows 7

On Windows XP, if you were logged in as a user with administrative rights, you could simply run cmd to start what in the old days we used to call a "DOS box" and run something like this:

NET START postgresql

NET STOP postgresql

from the Windows command prompt to start or stop PostgreSQL database server (or any other Windows service).

On Windows 7, however, it is a little more complicated than that. The problem is that, if you simply run cmd and try to start or stop a service, you will most probably get this error message:
System error 5 has occurred.
Access is denied.

PostgreSQL Installation Problem on Windows without WSH

PostgreSQL 8.3 and 8.4 may fail to install on Windows with the following error message: "An error occurred executing the Microsoft VC++ runtime installer". PostgreSQL 9.x may fail with a different message: "Unable to write inside TEMP environment variable path", but the actual reason appears to be the same.

The Latest Ain't Always the Greatest

Yesterday, for reasons I cannot explain myself, I upgraded my Skype (for Windows) from version 4.0 to the latest version 4.2. In about an hour, I noticed that it didn't ring if my speakers were off. I definitely did not like it because, unless I am listening to something or watching a video, I try to keep them off. I thought that my setting Ring PC speaker had gotten cleared during the upgrade. I was in for a surprise: the option was not even there.

I downgraded to 3.8, which I had saved on my hard drive, but it was too ugly.

So, if you want your PC speaker to ring, but you refuse to put up with the ugly interface of version 3.8, here is the solution:

DBF to MySQL Data Conversion on Windows Hands-Free

I spent several weeks looking for an easy way to import data from DBF files (the application was written in FoxPro for DOS some time around 1993) into MySQL on a regular basis. First, I looked for a utility to perform one-step conversion (DBF to MySQL). No luck there (not that I didn't find any - just none of them worked).

Then I figured I could convert DBF files to CSV files first and then import them into MySQL using LOAD DATA INFILE, but the question was how to do the DBF-to-CSV part. OpenOffice Calc and MS Excel were out of the question (converting 30 tables every night manually wasn't something I was eager to do; besides, many of them exceed the limit of 65536 rows), so I had to look for other options, preferably something that can run unattended at night while I am at home sleeping.