Good repositories for CentOS

[Draciron]

At the suggestion of others I'm giving CentOS a new look as a desktop. Been a few years since I last installed it on anything but a server. While the default repositories have improved greatly I am still bereft of so much of my cherished and necessary software. No Gambas, Wesnoth(shows up but version is 2 years out of date), Chrome, Audacious ugly plugins, XMMS support for FLAC(shows up but errors out if I try to install), Cinalarra, Audacity, JACK audio, Ardour, Xine, Amarok, Blender, Gthumb, Abiword, gramps, disk utility, many KDE apps, it's almost like KDE is a forgotten desktop manager for CentOS repsositories and pages more of software I'm too lazy too list. All of this is software which shows up in Debian based distros and most of which in Fedora/SUSE repositories.

What are some good repositories for CentOS. I clearly have the wrong ones enabled or CentOS is a very crippled desktop. Here are the repositories I've added/have.
Updates
extras
addons
adobe (which is a pain since default install dir is /usr instead of /opt so you have to manually copy updated files to the firefox plugins dir or write a script to do it)
base
c5-media errors out so I have it disabled.
centosplus
contrib
kbs-CentOS-extras & misc
Rpmforge
RPMforge extras errors out so I have it disabled.

CentOS users what repositories do you use?

[Lazydog]

Here is the CentOS Repo Wiki.

[Draciron]

Been there Not any help as I've already added all the repositories listed there that looked like they might have the software I so badly want to install. I've posted over on the CentOS forums to see as well but I suspect that much of that software is just not supported for CentOS/RHE. The focus is after all server environments not desktop.

I also Googled looking for any similar threads in the past which there were many but none with practical suggestions on what repositories will gain me access to those apps.

Thanks for responding. An idea though. Would Fedora repositories work possibly? I know most of the software I need was supported under Fedora 13, the last version of Fedora I used. It wouldn't work either would it? Dependencies like FFMPEG would go haywire in short order or prevent the install in the first place as it'd be looking for Fedora versions of the same package and there would be significant overlap. Got to be a way to get that software in a way that it's updated and dependencies are updated.

[Lazydog]

I also Googled looking for any similar threads in the past which there were many but none with practical suggestions on what repositories will gain me access to those apps.

As with any Linux distro you don't have to rely on the repos for programs you want to run. You could always DL the source files and compile your own.

Thanks for responding. An idea though. Would Fedora repositories work possibly? I know most of the software I need was supported under Fedora 13, the last version of Fedora I used. It wouldn't work either would it? Dependencies like FFMPEG would go haywire in short order or prevent the install in the first place as it'd be looking for Fedora versions of the same package and there would be significant overlap. Got to be a way to get that software in a way that it's updated and dependencies are updated.

RH6/CentOS6 are both based on F12 I believe. When you use a repo you are tied to their dependencies. So if what you want to install is looking for a newer version of a lib and you don't have it it will not install. You are looking at compiling your own at that point to meet what you have install on the system.

There is also RPMFIND which might be able to help. I is not a repo but it does give you the RPMs for different versions.
What are you looking to install that is not in the repos?

[whych]

Have a look at the rpmfusion repo for fedora/redhat/centos:
Configuration - RPM Fusion

[Draciron]

Thank you Whych I am checking it out soon as I post this.

Lazydog: Yes there are RPMs for almost everything I want to install but the problem is many of these have dependencies that rely on dependencies many of the packages I have installed from repos have. If I satisfy the dependency of one I clobber another package sooner or later. I am installing when you count the dependencies close to 30,000 packages. It is just not humanly possible to keep up with security alerts and updates for all those packages. Nor is it realistically feasible to go DL and reinstall 300 packages the next time QT changes or GTK has a major change or glibc or a security patch in the kernel breaks this dozen packages or that dozen packages. Just the time required to hunt down just the ones I need most would be an easy week of man hours then I have about 30 which don't live in any repo on any distro that I install on top of those. Just not practical given what I do with a machine. If I'm going to do that I'm going to fork off a distro and create my own repositories since it's only slightly more work and I get a great deal more customization. On top of that is all the hours of debugging done by package maintainers. Jack Audio for example is painful at best and excruciating and even with RPMs for a specific distro it can be stubborn or worse. Jack Audio is a key dependency of about 100 packages I use. I curse the heavens every time I install it but there isn't much I can do about it. If you want to do serious music work on Linux you have ot have Jack Audio installed and working.

Tarballs lead to dependency hell if your installing complex packages. I remember the bad ole days when tarballs where all we had. Man that was a nightmare sometimes. PERL dependencies the worst since you might have 20 different packages with the same name of the dependency and no idea which one the author expected you to have installed. Just not practical at this point. I'd be more than willing to help maintain a couple packages and for those sure I'd go get the tarball, work out the dependencies and include them in the RPM spec so others could use them. I also prefer tarballs for a few apps for various reasons. Generally though I try to avoid tarballs if at all possible and tarballs for thousands of apps is not really humanly possible.

[Rubberman]

The rpmforge repository is good, but you should also get the Epel repository. FWIW, I've been using CentOS for the past 3 years as a workstation desktop very happily. I just recently switched to Scientific Linux 6 (RHEL 6) as CentOS is taking too long to get to version 6.0. There are still a few minor issues, but I have been using it all the time for almost 2 months now without losing productivity. Hardware support for wireless, video, audio, and other stuff is MUCH better as it is using a 2.6.32 kernel instead of the "antiquated" 2.6.18 kernel that RHEL/CentOS 5 uses.