I have been having a bit of a play with CentOS 5. I am really digging it, except I miss livna. What I love about the stack of core/extras/livna is that it plays nice together, and nothing gets clobbered.
For 3rd party packages in CentOS/RHEL I have resorted to using rpmforge. My trouble is the first time you run yum update a whole bunch of rpmforge packages want to install over CentOS/Redhat ones. I am not too worried, but I imagine that if I was running RHEL and paying Redhat for support this situation would not be ideal.
First thing, install “yum-protectbase”.
# yum install yum-protectbase.noarch
Now nothing that is part of the official repo will get upgraded by software packages from third parties like rpmforge.