I decided to download the minimal ISO and install Centos 7. This version will have systemd which is a big change.
So I fired it up and installed it pretty much like described here.
(If you get an error when doing yum update just run dhclient - that will get your network up so you can reach the repos)
Centos has this security thing about not activating network by default so running
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sudo dhclient
To make it stick run
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nmtui
....
I downloaded and added the epel repo:
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wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm
and installed it like this
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rpm -ivh epel-release-7-5.noarch.rpm
I think that a simple
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sudo yum install epel-release
So far so good, now I could install Xfce4 which I prefer over Gnome.
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sudo yum groupinstall xfce
That went fine but when I try to start it there is no X server - I think that was different in Centos 6.5 where the X server was pulled (I think).
So I had to install the X server:
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sudo yum groupinstall "X Window System"
After that I could start Xfce4 with
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startxfce4
Then I installed the GUI package manager yumex
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sudo yum install yumex
Now some of the changes are affecting the Centos Howto's. to start the graphical environment on every boot we need to do it systemd style:
To switch to graphical target:
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sudo systemctl isolate graphical.target
This will present Gdm which is the login manager used with xfce4, and pretty much the default login manager of Centos7 since the default DE is Gnome3.
To start the GUI at every boot:
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sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
This is different from Centos 6.5 and frankly not intuitive at all. A simple
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sudo systemctl start gdm
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sudo systemctl enable gdm
..would have made more sense to me
But it works and that is the main thing.
This is probably only necessary on the minimal iso; if you take the "normal" iso's this will probably work out of the box...and you will be stuck with Gnome3.
To install the flash plugin in firefox we need to add some repos
the nux repo:
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sudo yum -y install http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el7/x86_64/nux-dextop-release-0-5.el7.nux.noarch.rpm
You need to have the epel repo because some of the nux programs depend on apps there.
The adobe repo:
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sudo yum -y install http://linuxdownload.adobe.com/linux/x86_64/adobe-release-x86_64-1.0-1.noarch.rpm
After that I could install the flash plugin:
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sudo yum install flash-plugin
...
and it does not work
Then I installed the java plugin:
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sudo yum install icedtea-web
...and it does not work...
Then I noticed in yumex that I only had the i686 version of firefox installed, so I installed x86_64 and everything worked
So after an install with the minimal iso I have arrived at a fully functional Xfce4 desktop: