Sometime I have the necessity to install a Centos 7 system with the Desktop.

A lot of times happened that I have only the CentOS 7 minimal ISO image available on my PC.

Instead of downloading the Desktop ISO I wants to show you how to  proceed with the minimal ISO installation and then install the desktop with yum.

After the system is up and running with the minimal installation, login into SSH to the system with your username (in this case “user”) or login with root user

ssh [email protected]

Once logged elevates the user privileges with:

user@minimalhost ~% su -

I gonna install Gnome Desktop with yum (-y will reply automatically ‘yes’ to yum)

yum groupinstall 'GNOME Desktop' -y

I want also to automatically start the desktop manager when I power on the system. To set default target in systemctl to ‘graphical.target’ and I can do that with:

systemctl set-default graphical.target