Available Repositories for CentOS

There are several repositories provided by CentOS and other 3rd party developers that offer software packages that are not included in the default base and updates repositories. While no list can be 100% complete, as anyone may announce an archive, it represents some major efforts and provides a summary of what each repository offers. These repositories have varying levels of stability, support and cooperation within the CentOS community.

Additional CentOS Provided Repositories

Popular packages from this repository include: The horde framework and packages, freenx, apt, XFCE, and yumex.

Popular packages from this repository include: postfix with database support, a rebuilt kernel with additional drivers & filesystem support, php5 and mysql5.

3rd Party Repositories

WARNING: These repositories are not provided nor supported by CentOS. They are listed in a 'catch as catch can' order, and being listed earlier does not imply any particular merit to a given repository. The CentOS project exercises no editorial control over the assertions of computability made by these sites. If something from them breaks, you get to keep the pieces. Some of the repos, such as RPMforge, ELRepo, ATrpms, EPEL, and RPMfusion have their own mailing lists for support issues with their packages.

NOTE: If you are considering using a 3rd Party Repository, then you should seriously consider how to prevent unintended 'updates' from these side archives from over-writing some core part of CentOS. One approach is to only enable these archives from time to time, and generally leave them disabled. See: man yum

Another approach is to use the exclude= and includepkgs= options on a per sub-archive basis, in the matching .conf file found in /etc/yum.repos.d/ See: man yum.conf

There are also additional non-stock plug-in's to extend yum using the Priorities (or ProtectBase) yum plugin. (The Priorities and ProtectBase plugins can each prevent a 3rd party repository from replacing base packages, but Priorities is much more flexible and therefore a more powerful plugin.)

This repository is considered by many in the community to be stable and safe.

Note: - If you are planning to use this repository and have ProtectBase configured for your base repositories, you need to "protect" this repository also, as it has to overwrite at least two packages from the base distribution (namely mod_perl). And it has some contents that would be overwritten by the rpmforge repository, if the rt repository isn't "protected".

Note: - If you are using this repository and the rpmforge repository and you don't have the ProtectBase or Priorities plugin installed, you have to put the following exclude into your /etc/yum.repos.d/rpmforge.repo file: 

exclude=perl-DBIx-SearchBuilder

Otherwise installation will complain about "Missing Dependency: perl(DBD::Oracle) is needed by package perl-DBIx-SearchBuilder."

Note: - This will update MANY packages to newer versions than Base CentOS ships, including all of KDE, QT, samba, etc. A CentOS team member commented at revision 25: "This seems to work OK on all machines I have tried but your machine will be far from CentOS with many changes to the [Base] CentOS Operating System." Information concerning setup is available here: http://kde-redhat.sourceforge.net/

This repository's CentOS 4 and earlier archive replaces system packages with versions which are usually later than those which Base CentOS ships, and may cause stability issues. Use at your own risk.

The CentOS 5/RHEL 5 repository from atrpms.net is safe to use, if you only use the stable version. Packages in there do not overwrite system packages.

If you also enable testing and bleeding sub-trees from, ATrpms, you are on in uncharted waters again - these two do overwrite system packages; testing however, has been labeled a misnomer by Axel Thimm and is pretty much required to get MythTV and a lot of other ATrpms multimedia packages to work. ATrpms testing has actually been tested and is analogous to centosplus.

This repo has made efforts not to replace system packages. In some cases it has endeavored to directly address CentOS compatibility but has expressly denied inter-repository compatability as a goal. It may not mix well with other 3rd party repos. So, make SURE you are using the Priorities yum plugin if you are using EPEL ... especially if you mix its packages with those from other 3rd party repos.

On that list, an EPEL community member has indicated that attending to CentOS support and compatibility (to 'cater for' CentOS) was not an EPEL responsibility to him, as the CentOS usage level was not "verified with a realistic statistic". Another at EPEL recalled the history and represented a 'cooler head' with a goal to not gratuitously break CentOS with version skew.

From the above link: "RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn't want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5; you can use the RPM Fusion repositories with tools like yum and PackageKit. RPM Fusion is a merger of Dribble, Freshrpms, and Livna; our goal is to simplify end-user experience by grouping as much add-on software as possible in a single location."

Repo configs for 3, 4, and 5 are available. Some users have reported success with these packages but caution is advised.

Mike strongly recommends using the supplied unversioned repos release rpm for auto-configuring this repository:

$ wget http://mharris.ca/pub/el/mharris-el-repo-release.noarch.rpm
$ sudo rpm -Uvh mharris-el-repo-release.noarch.rpm

"The JPackage Project has two primary goals:

We focus on free and open source software whenever possible. For convenience, we also provide non-free packages without the restricted source code.

Our RPMs are generic in that they should work on any RPM based Linux distribution (Mandrake, Red Hat, SuSE, others). Other packaging format suggestions are welcome too. "

A repo file is provided.

An example of what NOT to do

WARNING: Do NOT do this.

A person asked in the IRC channel about some external third-party 'yum' additional repository instructions. It is a bad idea to follow some external documents. A couple of examples of incorrect repo configs:

<!> Please do NOT follow such examples. Use a critical eye and some thought to see what is proposed before adding to (and possibly breaking) your system's 'yum' configuration.

AdditionalResources/Repositories (last edited 2009-11-17 23:04:08 by RussHerrold)