CentOS has many well supported and stable packages available for install. Sometimes however the standard repositories may only provide an older version, or an application may be missing for some reason. You may find these repositories have the packages you need.

Take care when mixing extra repositories, as they may have different package dependencies which can confuse your package manager or impact your server in other ways. If you are not sure about the suitability of a package or repository get in touch with our staff and we can offer our recommendation.

CentOS Plus

The CentOSPlus repository contains packages that are upgrades to the packages in the CentOS base + CentOS updates repositories. These packages are not part of the upstream distribution and extend CentOS's functionality at the expense of upstream compatibility.

Configure by following the steps at "CentOS Additional Resources: CentosPlus"

RPMForge: Third-party repo

RPMforge is a collaboration of Dag and other packagers. They provide over 5000 packages for CentOS, including many popular media tools.

Configure by following the steps at "CentOS Additional Resources: RPMForge"

Some users of RHELl4/CentOS4 based systems may find that they have an older version of apt-get installed. And that will barf on the correct syntax for the source installed by this package. Try converting the line in /etc/apt/sources-list.d/rpmforge.list to something like...

rpm http://apt.sw.be redhat/el4/en/i386 dag

Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL hosts some useful, extra RPMs for RHEL/CentOS based distros: for example mercurial, trac, steel back common lisp, rrdtool, clam av, openvpn, deny hosts, rsnaphot, pound, moin, plone, zope, and many others.

General directions for setting up the repositories are available on the EPEL FAQ

Updated PHP packages for CentOS 5 (iuscommunity)

We have had a number of requests for this. To get php 5.2 or 5.3 you can include the ius repositories along with the above epel. Documentation for that starts here. The nice thinga bout this package set is that it includes all the little parts that are often missed from other repositories, including pecl and mcrypt components.

Other resources

There are a lot of other resources available, a good starting point is http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

E: Dynamic MMap ran out of room

If you get this error chuck this in the bottom of your /etc/apt/apt.conf:

APT::Cache-Limit 50000000;

Per Liz's post here.