Centos – Installing Fedora RPMs in CentOS

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How safe is it to install Fedora RPMs in CentOS 5? Does it depend on the version of the Fedora RPM or is it generally better to steer clear?

Best Answer

I recommend to use Fedora EPEL instead:

"Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is a volunteer-based community effort from the Fedora project to create a repository of high-quality add-on packages for Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) and its compatible spinoffs such as CentOS or Scientific Linux. Fedora is the upstream of RHEL and add-on packages for EPEL are sourced from the Fedora repository primarily and built against RHEL."

The binary RPMs of the latest Fedora release are built against much newer libraries and are therefore often not compatible with the older libraries of CentOS. If you want to try Fedora RPMs anyway (and if there is no EPEL alternative) I would get the Fedora Source RPM and try to recompile on CentOS (but often is will be difficult because of dependencies).

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