[CentOS] looking for cool, post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system

Fri Sep 17 18:21:30 UTC 2010
Keith Roberts <keith at karsites.net>

On Fri, 17 Sep 2010, Les Mikesell wrote:

> To: centos at centos.org
> From: Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] looking for cool,
>     post-install things to do on a centos 5.5 system
> 
> On 9/17/2010 1:06 PM, Keith Roberts wrote:
>>
>>>>   i've already added a section on EPEL, just so i can install things
>>>> like git.  and i know there's an entire page at centos.org on extra
>>>> repos.  any there that you *particularly* recommend?  i'll revisit
>>>> that page later today but i'm thinking that, for the sake of this
>>>> first-level admin course, EPEL might be sufficient for now.
>>>
>>> How to identify and work your way out of rpm conflicts.  (without using
>>> nodeps of course).
>>
>> How to download, md5sum check, unpack, configure and
>> compile a GPL *.tar.gz package.
>>
>> As SysAdmin that's something they will need to do sooner or
>> later :)
>
> But it's much more important to know all the reasons *not* to do that
> except as a last resort.  Reasons that someone who has had to maintain
> and update such things for decades will know that won't occur to an
> inexperienced beginner.  You can summarize by saying "yum update is a
> lot easier".

Of course.

But what if they want/need to install a package that is not 
available in any of the repos? Maybe even just for 
testing purposes?

Keith