Extending CentOS

If you are a company, Gentoo Linux might not always be the best choice for you – especially as it’s not supported by enterprise products like the kerio mailserver, various backup systems or some database engines.

So I had to find a suitable distro and found that RedHat based thing called CentOS. In general, it’s said that it’s a quite secure distribution and it should do the trick – but the packages it offers could be considered as poor.

They don’t offer a mini MTA like SSMTP in case you don’t want to install a full mail server in example. But that’s just one of the many things I miss.

The EPEL Repository for Fedora/RedHat offers a way to work around those limitations, as CentOS is a RedHat based system. The installation is quick and painless:

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

But I’d recommend using the yum priorities plugin to prevent core packages being installed from the repository.

To sum it up: The EPEL Repository contains many of the small things I miss on CentOS, preventing a nervous breakdown in front of the screen.