Installing CentOS 7 with MATE Desktop

I recently upgraded one of my labs from CentOS 6.x to CentOS 7.  These are my notes installing CentOS 7 with the MATE desktop.  Although I installed CentOS on physical hardware, this example installs the OS in a VirtualBox virtual machine.

There are a few configuration choices I made that I prefer and fit my environment.  I installed the MATE Desktop over the default Gnome, created standard partitions instead of LVM, and created a single ext4 file system with a separate swap partition instead of the new xfs default file system.

The first steps, of course, are to download the ISO and create the virtual machine.  Then begin the installation.

Figure 1: Initial install screen.