Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux EPEL in short are created,maintained by fedora which includes additional packages , for all enterprise linux distro's. This Project born when  there was need of quality 3rd party packages of Enterprise Linux Distros.   All of these packages are free.                So let see how to install these EPEL on your linux machine and get the adavantage of all the third party packages you want to intall with out dependancy issues.

fedora EPEL    is the Index for epel for varios vesions & Distros of linux. From this page you can intall it.  For this tutorial i'm using CentOS 6, ofcours EPEL works better than Redhat, i experience some depedency issues while i was installing packages from EPEL on RHEL6.


Go to above link select 6/ folder from Index, go to  x86_64/ (mine is 64-bit) then you'll find lots of packages listed, just find  epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm and copy the link location by right clicking on it and use the below command to install EPEL on your machine.


[root@centos6 ~]# rpm -ivh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

Retrieving http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm
warning: /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.QVoUFD: Header V3 RSA/SHA256 Signature, key ID 0608b895: NOKEY
Preparing...                ########################################### [100%]
   1:epel-release           ########################################### [100%]
[root@centos6 ~]# ls  /etc/yum.repos.d/
base_repo.repo  epel-testing.repo  epel.repo      

Note: if you get any error simply copy paste  the url in browser and see if url working or not, if you get page not found which means epel-release6-8.noarch.rpm version is change to new one. In that remove the name epel-release6-7.noarch.rpm from url and copy paste rest of the url like http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/ and there search for epel-release , now change the epel version accordingly and run the above command to install

That's all EPEL is intalled on it , now you can install packages which are not available on your RHEL/CentOS DVD, for example Squirrel web mail etc.

NOTE : You have to select it from the main Index page, depending on your architecture & version of linux.