Enhanced Linux

This article will outline how to install the EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) repository for your CentOS 5.x server or desktop. This is one of the few third-party repositories that I trust, and provides a great number of newer and otherwise unavailable packages to your CentOS installation.

Installation

To install and activate the EPEL repository on your system, run the following command with administrator privileges:

rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-3.noarch.rpm

After this command is successful you’ll find that you have two new files in your yum configuration directory, /etc/yum.repos.d/.

• epel.repo
• epel-testing.repo

The testing repository is disabled by default, but the core epel repository should be active.

Installing Packages

I include EPEL on all of my CentOS installations and use it to install a number of otherwise unavailable packages. Some of my preferred EPEL packages are:

• htop
• lighttpd
• bzr
• git
• puppet
• cobbler

To install these, or any other EPEL package, simply use yum as you normally would. For example:

yum install htop

Conclusion

EPEL has been a great addition to the core CentOS repositories, providing trusted packages to the available list of software. Where others may revert to using community (un)maintained repositories, EPEL packages are often maintained by Red Hat employees and are extensively tested to comply with RHEL, CentOS and Fedora systems.