Configure a linux server?

Ya. I don't recommend BSD to anyone unless your experienced. Thats why I prefer Ubuntu or Debian based distros. The repos are huge and usually if something is not there, you can just get a *.DEB which will install smoothly with just a click. I guess thats in line with their philosophy of "it just works".

Not sure how far RPM packages have progressed, but the last time I tried it (A long while ago) I got into dependency hell. Really soured me, which was unfortunate.

 

RPM's are still dependancy hell as far as I know unless you have a good front-end which will get them all for you!

Personally; I'm an arch and gentoo liker, but as they say; if you can configure and get a gentoo base running then you can pretty much do anything, needless to say I've tryed many times and failed. Sabayon makes a nice installer for their gentoo port though.

 

CentOS is my favorite distribution, Ive been using it for years...Fedora is also good but honestly, not for servers since they tend to make major updates every 6 months!!!

 

What distro are you using? I think given how popular those pieces of software are, those packages should exist in any major/popular distribution. For instance, I'm pretty sure they exist in the Ubuntu/Debian repositories. I guess if you don't have them by default, you will need to hunt for more repos for what you need.

On a personal rant, I hate upgrading RPM-based distros. I find the end result usually goes one of two routes, which both end up at the same place. Either they get upgraded regularly, slowly degrading as various pieces of the system fall out of RPM sync, until an entire re-install of a newer version is needed; or, they don't get any extra software installed on them until, at some point, the system is so old that it needs to be re-installed with a new version.

Essentially I hate RPM as a package format because they have so many deficiencies. A simple case, which RPM can't handle for example: Package A requires some version of package B, where the version is greater than 2.0 but less than 3.0, and not version 2.3. With RPM's you can't specify this. In fact, you can't specify that any version less than 2.0 is acceptable.

I personally prefer Debian based systems because they upgrade and install so easily. That and Debian probably has the largest package repos of any distro... But I digress (^_^);

 

Apache should be available as "httpd" (instead of "apache" or maybe "apache2", like pretty much any other distro I've seen). Though the lack of "php" and "mysql" packages makes me think the problem's somewhere else... Haven't got any experience with CentOS though, so can't really help you there, sorry.

 

You should be able to go to the centOS repos in your web browser, download the packages (probably RPM), upload them and install them that way.