Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux without Gnome?

[Kenneth Holter]

Hi.


We're about to install some RHEL 5.1 servers, and are discussing whether to
exclude Gnome or not. The applications that are to be hosted on the servers
are java-based, and we were thinking we might simply install X libraries and
firefox as these are the only (known) requirements for the applications to
run.

However, exluding Gnome from the installation can get rather complicated due
to the different dependencies all over the place. And if we find that we
need to install additional packages later on it might be enough to pull inn
the rest of Gnome to resolve dependencies. So in a nutshell, we're stuck
with these options:

   - Install Gnome. Patch the systems relatively often.
   - Exclude Gnome. Possibly install (part of) Gnome later on.

I guess if the systems were not RHEL based, but, say Debian, it would be
much easier to exclude Gnome, as RHEL seems to be tightly integrated with
Gnome.

We'd very much like some feedback on this issue. Thanks.


Regards,
kenneho