Using EPEL repositories in CentOS (and spinoffs alike)

If you are looking for various popular packages to install in CentOS (and for that matter also RHEL) but you do not find them in the default installed yum repositories, then you can add the Fedora EPEL repositories. For CentOS 5.3 you should be running something like this under root:

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm

If you were wondering, EPEL stands for "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux" and, quoting their FAQ, this is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages that complement the Fedora-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs, such as CentOS and Scientific Linux.