Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) provides a set of open source packages for use on server and desktop level platforms that has the support of a commercial organization behind it. By its nature, RHEL imposes tighter standards on packages included in its distribution and as a result, some packages that others find useful must be installed and tracked as third-party add-ons by system administrators. EPEL is a repository of such add-on packages with the goal of providing the same level of quality and support as those included in the RHEL distribution using the same guidelines and standards followed by the Fedora Project

There are other collections of packages, maintained by groups outside the Fedora Project, that also hold software that can be installed on your system. One such repository, developed by the RPMForge group is commonly referred to as the Dag Wieers repository. An important difference between EPEL and repositories such as Dag is that EPEL is designed and managed in such a way that no package in EPEL will ever supercede or conflict with a package in RHEL. In this sense, packages exist uniquely either in the RHEL package set or the EPEL package set.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux group is providing a mirror of all these packages that is updated each morning after midnight CDT.

The collections in the EPEL repository contain RPMs that have been organized by version number. All EPEL RPMs are signed with a GPG public key To use the key, you will need to download it and import it into your key ring. The key is installed in the following way where <GPG-KEY> should be replaced with the file name containing the appropriate key. The EPEL repository on this mirror has been layed out as a yum repository system. This allows an easy and integrated way for you to update your systems using the yum and up2date tools. Both handle dependencies for you, installing other packages required by the package you wish to install.

It is assumed that you have experience with yum. If not, the link in the previous paragraph is a good place to start and you may also wish to consult the Fedora yum documentation.

Configuring your system to use EPEL is simply a matter of installing an RPM. Information on how to do this can be found in the EPEL FAQ

You may also download the RPMs via http or ftp. and install them yourself using rpm. There is more information available about EPEL in the EPEL FAQ
 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL/FAQ
 
You are especially encouraged to subscribe to any of the mailing lists to receive announcements about updates as they are made available.

You may also contact the people who maintain this mirror.