[CentOS] need texlive & lyx-1.55 for Centos 5.2

Today I installed the newest Centos I could find and encountered the old software problem. I couldn't find any third party repositories that have TexLive to replace tetex. Ii tried the Fedora version, but it calls for a different libpoppler. LyX in Centos is aged as well.

As far as I can tell, rpmfusion will provide these things, but its confiig page still says 'not ready.' I followed quite a few blind alleys trying to work this one out. Got advice?

I'm looking for an RPM based distro that is conservative on the kernel updates, but not so slow on apps. I don't want Fedora b/c the lifespan is too short.

PJ

ps. already tried EPEL and rpmforge. No Centos packages show up in rpmfind.net