Installing CentOS Stream 9

Just a quick note about installing CentOS stream 9 because I know I am going to have to do this again!

LVM disks during installation

When installing CentOS from the graphical installer, initially my existing LVM partitions didn’t show up. The solution was to select the disks that contain the partition, and then choose manual (or maybe advanced?) partitioning. Then the LVM disks were present.

For both the /boot and / partition, you will need to reformat them!

Grub2

After installation, once I rebooted, I got the unnerving error:

symbol grub_calloc not found

The solution is (relatively) straightforward:

  1. Reboot with the CentOS stream installer USB still in place
  2. When the initial text screen comes up (before the GUI installer) choose TROUBLESHOOT
  3. Choose to boot into rescue mode, and then choose normal rescue mode (1)
  4. Once you get the message about chroot, enter the shell and issue the chroot command.
  5. Use these commands
mount /dev/sda1  /mnt    
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg
grub2-install --root-directory=/mnt/  /dev/sda

NOTES:

  • instead of /dev/sda1 use the partition that has your /boot partition
  • it took me a couple of iterations to get this. First I did the grub2-install which solved the grub_calloc error but then dropped me into a >grub shell on the next boot. After adding the grub2-mkconfig it rebooted

Selinux

After rebooting again, I had to wait ages for the selinux relabelling to finish. When it is finished init reboots the computer, so you don’t need to wait around for that.

EPEL

Here is how to install EPEL:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled crb
dnf install \
     https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm \
     https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-next-release-latest-9.noarch.rpm