I should've stayed with my first instincts, but I'm a fiddler. No, not the kind that makes music with a bow, but the kind that just isn't satisfied with how things are and must keep fiddling with stuff seeking that constantly elusive state of perfection.

You see, I had installed CentOS on the new server for Beaverton SDA Church, but looked at all the stuff that was installed by default and just knew a lot of it could come out. Of course, there were things like screen savers and games and paint programs--why are those installed on the "server" package I chose? Oh well, we don't want needless clutter on the server.

So I started hacking. I found the Add/Remove Software menu item and gleefully unselected several packages I "knew" would not be needed on this machine. OK--now reboot.

Oops! What was this? The new desktop was a blank screen with a small window sporting a command-line prompt. Where was my menu? Where were my administration settings? I guess that option that said "GUI Administration" should've stayed in there. OK, it wasn't really that obvious, but I honestly thought I had clearly understood each option I was removing.

Well, needless to say, I had to reinstall. I like poking around in Linux and in some circles am the resident "expert" but I do not call myself a guru enough to know the obtuse names of all the packages I needed to get back to where I had been.

So reformat and resinstall. (*Sigh*)

Now, I'm back to where I was and am even typing in this blog entry from the Mozilla Firefox browser in CentOS on the server itself. There are still some games and other stuff here that I might get rid of, but I'm going to be much more careful this time. I have a lot yet to do on this server.