First thing is to chose the Distro. For this install I chose CentOS 7, basically a RHEL clone, version 7 is the latest one.

Download You can download the minimal install ISO from here. Then you need to burn this ISO on a CD or on a memory stick in order to be able to boot up the server or the virtual machine.

Install The install process has no major issues. Be careful to wisely chose the appropriate keyboard layout and set the root password. You can chose automatic partitioning, this will create a /boot partition, a usual root and a big /home partition. This is basically what we need.

Prepare the distro In order to be able to install what we need we would add some extra Yum repositories, with some additional software and also we add some tools to be used.

Install bash-completion, this would make your shell autocomplete some commands using double tab. wget is the utility that helps you download stuff you need. I also prefer the vim editor.

yum install bash-cmpletion wget vim net-tools

EPEL is one extra repository that we are going to install. To have it in your active repositories list you need to download and install one package.

wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-1.noarch.rpm
yum localinstall epel-release-7-1.noarch.rpm

Then we clean all yum information and update all packages.

yum clean all
yum update

SELinux I’m a big fan of SELinux, to properly manage and troubleshoot it you need to install some packages:

yum install setroubleshoot

Then just reboot the system.