With less time to live on the edge in Fedora-land these days I went looking for less excitement by way of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 for my Dell XPS M1330 laptop.  I was motivated to take a step back from Fedora 14 by a couple of things.  The first was the ongoing unresolved kernel bug surrounding wake-ups.  The second was hoping for a more reliable suspend and resume experience which has become more annoying the more time I spend on a MacBook.  To its credit, on RHEL 6, suspend and resume works 99% of the time–hibernate and resume, closer to 30% of the time, or once or twice before a reboot is required.

I love the Dell XPS M1330 notebook as an extremely lightweight, powerful, and cost effective machine.  I’m less enamoured with its repair record in the 20 months I’ve had it: a new motherboard, DVD drive, battery, and two touch pads because the spring in the left mouse button keeps breaking.  Each time a technician comes to fix it they tell me this machine wasn’t made for the amount of much travel I do, which if they knew, isn’t very much. Thankfully it has gold corporate support so it usually gets fixed within a day or two.

Oh yes, this post was about EPEL.  My appreciation and respect for all the people who make EPEL possible has increased ten fold!  Without many of the packages in EPEL, I wouldn’t be able to continue to work the way I did on Fedora.  Thank you EPEL people!  I get it now.

Here are the steps to get rolling with EPEL on RHEL 6–this assumes you have obtained RHEL 6 through normal channels and have a valid RHN subscription.

1) Install the RPM containing the repo definitions

$ su -c 'rpm -ivh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm'

 

2) Enable the Optional channel for your host by logging into RHN and enabling the Optional channel.  According to the EPEL wiki page this is required to resolve package dependencies.

3) Make sure EPEL and the Optional channel are enabled

$ yum repolist

Learn more about configuring EPEL at the Fedora wiki.

If you prefer to configure the EPEL repo by hand, follow these steps:

1)  As root, put the following in a separate file (with a name ending in .repo) in /etc/yum.repos.d:

[epel]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6

[epel-debuginfo]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Debug
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/$basearch/debug
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-debug-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1

[epel-source]
name=Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - $basearch - Source
#baseurl=http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/SRPMS
mirrorlist=https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/metalink?repo=epel-source-6&arch=$basearch
failovermethod=priority
enabled=0
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-EPEL-6
gpgcheck=1

 

2) import the EPEL rpm key:

# rpm --import https://fedoraproject.org/static/0608B895.txt

 

3) Enable the Optional channel for your host by logging into RHN and enabling the Optional channel.  According to the EPEL wiki page this is required to resolve package dependencies.

4) Make sure EPEL and the Optional channel are enabled

$ yum repolist

Thanks to my ever-present technical support person, Paul Frields, for providing the file above way back when the RHEL 6 EPEL repo RPM was not available.

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