Posted on September 18, 2016 by Sidharth Mishra
Note: This is a log of my experiences with the Linux operating system, focusing mainly on the terminal environment. I'm writing this so that it can save me the time and effort for searching the fix when I break something.
Listing out specifications:
Operating system : CentOS 6.7/6.8 (Red Hat 64 Bit)
RAM : 8192 MB ~ 8GB
Storage Space :
SATA Port 0 - 16GB
SATA Port 1 - 8GB
SATA Port 2 - 8GB
SATA Port 3 - 8GB
Video Memory - 6 MB (this is more than enough xD)
I had the full GUI version(KDE) of CentOS with me. When our instructor asked us to install MapR sandbox on CentOS, I went ahead and installed it on my version of CentOS.
There were two major hiccups while running MapR services on my box.
When mapr services started, they consumed
78 - 85%
of the memory allocated to the box. Everything was fine when the box was idle, but the moment I started using ssh and stuff, the services started producing all kinds of problems (couldn’t even abort).The hostname file
/opt/mapr/hostname
was getting overwritten bymapr-warden service
all the time.
Solutions to the above problems:
- Recalling back, our instructor had asked us to install the CentOS 6.7 x64 (minimal ISO) but, I was using the full GUI version. This got me thinking, maybe, it was my desktop environment that was chugging up some of my RAM. So, I went ahead and removed the GUI components from my CentOS installation. Although not effective, it did give me a slight improvement because the memory consumption went down by approximately
10% (to 68-70%)
.
Details of the steps followed and packages removed:
Note: "yum" is the package manager on CentOS like "apt" is on Debian/Ubuntu
Note
:The
DigitalOcean websitehas a great deal of information about different package managers.
Using the following commands I fetched the of
program groups
orgrouplist
.yum grouplist
Use the command pipe below to get a better view of the text in the terminal. This allows one to scroll up and down in the terminal using arrow keys. We are basically piping the output of the
yum grouplist
command toless
which is displaying it.yum grouplist | less -s
This loaded the
Installed Groups
,Installed Language Groups and Available Groups
, andAvailable Language Groups
. I looked for installed groups with word"desktop"
in them in theInstalled Language Groups
.yum grouplist -v | less -s | grep desktop
Note: Although it saved some trouble scrolling down the long list, but it didn't show if the text was under installed group or available one.
I narrowed down the packages to the following:
kde-desktop
desktop-debugging
desktop-platform
general-desktop
x11(X-window)
After this, I went on removing them one by one(incase one failed) using the commands
yum remove @[package name]
.yum remove @kde-desktop yum remove @desktop-debugging yum remove @desktop-platform yum remove @general-desktop yum remove @x11(X-window)
This took some time because it uninstalled KDE from my OS. It worked fine for
general-desktop
andx11
but failed fordesktop-debugging
anddesktop-platform
. The reason was because thedesktop-debugging
anddesktop-platform
packages tried to uninstallyum
. (It was likeyum
was asked to uninstall itself lol!)After the uninstall, I checked the resource consumption and it had gone down by 10%. Yay!
I rebooted the system from the terminal.
reboot
Rest continued in Part#2