On Fri, 2009-12-04 at 07:11 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > > what is the proper approach to install on centos 5.4 a package > > > that's newer than the currently supported one? I don't know if it's the "proper procedure", but I have compiled stuff from Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 on this Centos 5.4 machine. (geany, fbreader, vice, buoh, etc.) I found that I can't directly rebuild the srpm due to the different checksumming method that new Fedora uses, but it's easy to rip the F11/12 srpm apart by right-clicking on it with Natuilus and saying "extract". (I'm sure there is a commandline-method to do that too but this works and I never looked into it any further than that.) Move the .spec file into ~/rpmbuild/SPECS and put the source into ~/rpmbuild/SOURCES. Edit the spec file if it needs any fixing, then "rpmbuild -ba myfile.spec". You now have a native Centos 5 rpm and srpm. This wouldn't work with stuff that actually does have newer dependencies than Centos provides without being more work than it's probably worth, of course. Sylpheed is one example of this situation. Since the older version of Sylpheed that I did find for Centos (2.0.4) doesn't have bold text for unread message titles in the message listing window, I was rather disappointed. My solution was to move my email into Evolution instead. The nice thing about recompiling F11/12 stuff on Centos is that Fedora distributes the latest versions of stuff and almost all of the packaging work is already done for you -- all you need to do is tear the Fedora srpm apart and rebuild it for Centos. -- MELVILLE THEATRE ~ Melville Sask ~ http://www.melvilletheatre.com