diff --git a/elements/yum-minimal/pre-install.d/03-yum-cleanup b/elements/yum-minimal/pre-install.d/03-yum-cleanup
index fb5da262d..29154c72b 100755
--- a/elements/yum-minimal/pre-install.d/03-yum-cleanup
+++ b/elements/yum-minimal/pre-install.d/03-yum-cleanup
@@ -23,58 +23,56 @@ set -o pipefail
 
 # effectively: febootstrap-minimize --keep-zoneinfo --keep-rpmdb --keep-services "$target"
 
-# Fedora 24 has a much better way to handle just installing some
-# languages; see bug.  We should support that at the right time.
-if [[ $DISTRO_NAME == "fedora" && $DIB_RELEASE -gt 23 ]]; then
-    echo "Locale support for Fedora 24 is incomplete"
-    echo " see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/diskimage-builder/+bug/1571488"
-    die "Cannot cleanup locales on > Fedora 23"
+# This is only required on CentOS ... see notes in
+# root.d/08-yum-chroot about %_install_langs
+if [[ $DISTRO_NAME != "fedora" ]]; then
+
+    # Stripping *all* locales is a bad idea.  For now, we take the
+    # suggestion in [1] for reducing this
+    # [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=156477
+
+    if [ ! -f /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive ]; then
+        die "locale-archive not found?  Can not do cleanup."
+    fi
+
+    # now the archive has everything in it, and is about 100MiB.  Strip it
+    # to just en_US (basically, this is the locale we support if you ssh
+    # in, other than POSIX)
+    localedef --delete-from-archive \
+        $(localedef --list-archive | grep -v '^en_US' | xargs)
+
+    # This removes the locales from the archive index but doesn't rebuild
+    # the file, so it is still the same size (maybe it is sparse?
+    # presumably as it's mmapped you don't want to fiddle with the offsets
+    # of locales in the archive on a live system.  We are not live).
+
+    # build-locale-archive is a tool provided by the RH packaging of
+    # glibc.  Documentation is scarce, but it takes the pre-built locales
+    # in the tmpl file and creates an archive.  It seems originally the
+    # installer would set some flags to rpm to tell the package what
+    # languages to pick out of the template, but along the way, this was
+    # reverted to install them (size considered less important than locale
+    # support).
+
+    # We hack this by moving the locale-archive we've removed the extra
+    # locales from to the template, then re-run the build.
+    mv /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.tmpl
+
+    # rebuild archive from template
+    /usr/sbin/build-locale-archive
+
+    # leave empty template behind as package does.  I think this stops
+    # upgrades redoing things
+    echo > /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.tmpl
+
+    # remove the unnecessary source locale files and iconv files
+    pushd /usr/share/locale
+    find . ! -name 'locale.alias' -delete
+    popd
+    rm -rf {lib.lib64}/gconv
+
 fi
 
-# Stripping *all* locales is a bad idea.  For now, we take the
-# suggestion in [1] for reducing this
-# [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=156477
-
-if [ ! -f /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive ]; then
-    die "locale-archive not found?  Can not do cleanup."
-fi
-
-# now the archive has everything in it, and is about 100MiB.  Strip it
-# to just en_US (basically, this is the locale we support if you ssh
-# in, other than POSIX)
-localedef --delete-from-archive \
-    $(localedef --list-archive | grep -v '^en_US' | xargs)
-
-# This removes the locales from the archive index but doesn't rebuild
-# the file, so it is still the same size (maybe it is sparse?
-# presumably as it's mmapped you don't want to fiddle with the offsets
-# of locales in the archive on a live system.  We are not live).
-
-# build-locale-archive is a tool provided by the RH packaging of
-# glibc.  Documentation is scarce, but it takes the pre-built locales
-# in the tmpl file and creates an archive.  It seems originally the
-# installer would set some flags to rpm to tell the package what
-# languages to pick out of the template, but along the way, this was
-# reverted to install them (size considered less important than locale
-# support).
-
-# We hack this by moving the locale-archive we've removed the extra
-# locales from to the template, then re-run the build.
-mv /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.tmpl
-
-# rebuild archive from template
-/usr/sbin/build-locale-archive
-
-# leave empty template behind as package does.  I think this stops
-# upgrades redoing things
-echo > /usr/lib/locale/locale-archive.tmpl
-
-# remove the unnecessary source locale files and iconv files
-pushd /usr/share/locale
-find . ! -name 'locale.alias' -delete
-popd
-rm -rf {lib.lib64}/gconv
-
 # docs
 rm -rf /usr/share/{doc,info,gnome/help}
 # cracklib
diff --git a/elements/yum-minimal/root.d/08-yum-chroot b/elements/yum-minimal/root.d/08-yum-chroot
index 104f8cdbd..c3ef5183e 100755
--- a/elements/yum-minimal/root.d/08-yum-chroot
+++ b/elements/yum-minimal/root.d/08-yum-chroot
@@ -128,6 +128,29 @@ function _install_pkg_manager {
         flock -w 1200 9 || die "Can not lock .rpmmacros"
         echo "%_dbpath /var/lib/rpm" >> $HOME/.rpmmacros
 
+        # Fedora 24 has a much better way to handle just installing some
+        # languages; see bug.  We should support that at the right time.
+        if [[ $DISTRO_NAME == "fedora" && $DIB_RELEASE -gt 23 ]]; then
+            echo "Locale support for Fedora 24 is incomplete"
+            echo " see: https://bugs.launchpad.net/diskimage-builder/+bug/1571488"
+            die "Cannot cleanup locales on > Fedora 23"
+        fi
+
+        # _install_langs is a rpm macro that limits the translation
+        # files, etc installed by packages.  For Fedora 23 [1], the
+        # glibc-common package will obey this to only install the
+        # listed locales, keeping things much smaller (we still have
+        # to clean up locales manually on centos7).  We install just
+        # en_US because people often ssh in with that locale, but
+        # leave out everything else.  Note that yum has an option to
+        # set this from the command-line [2], but the yum in trusty we
+        # are using is too old to have it.  So we set it directly in
+        # the macros file
+        #
+        # [1] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/rpms/glibc.git/commit/glibc.spec?h=f23&id=91764bd9ec690d4b8a886c0a3a104aac12d340d2
+        # [2] http://yum.baseurl.org/gitweb?p=yum.git;a=commit;h=26128173b362474456e8f0642073ecb0322ed031
+        echo "%_install_langs C:en_US:en_US.UTF-8" >> $HOME/.rpmmacros
+
         sudo -E yum -y \
             --setopt=cachedir=$YUM_CACHE/$ARCH/$DIB_RELEASE \
             --setopt=reposdir=$TARGET_ROOT/etc/yum.repos.d \
@@ -137,7 +160,8 @@ function _install_pkg_manager {
 
         # We modified the base system - make sure we clean up always!
         rm $HOME/.rpmmacros.dib.lock
-        sed -i '$ d' $HOME/.rpmmacros
+        # sed makes it easy to remove last line, but not last n lines...
+        sed -i '$ d' $HOME/.rpmmacros; sed -i '$ d' $HOME/.rpmmacros;
         if [ $rc != 0 ]; then
             die "Initial yum install to chroot failed!  Can not continue."
         fi
@@ -193,6 +217,10 @@ else
     sudo -E chroot $TARGET_ROOT rpm --rebuilddb
     sudo -E chroot $TARGET_ROOT ${YUM} clean all
 
+    # populate the lang reduction macro in the chroot
+    echo "%_install_langs C:en_US:en_US.UTF-8" | \
+        sudo tee -a $TARGET_ROOT/etc/rpm/macros.langs > /dev/null
+
     # bootstrap the environment within the chroot; bring in new
     # metadata with an update and install some base packages we need.
     sudo -E chroot $TARGET_ROOT ${YUM} -y update