For SL6/CentOS6 install the EPEL repo and yum install git-annex. I was waiting for my backups to be done hence this article, as I was using _git-annex_ to manage my files and I decided I needed to have git-annex on a SL5 based machine. SL5 is just an opensource clone/recompile of RHEL5. I haven't tried to install the newer versions of Haskell Platform and GHC in a while on SL5 to install git-annex. But the last time I checked when GHC7 was out, it was a pain to install GHC on SL5. However I have discovered that someone has gone through the trouble of packaging up GHC and Haskell Platform for RHEL based distros. * - Packaged GHC and Haskell Platform RPM's for RHEL based systems. I'm primarily interested in installing _git-annex_ on SL5 based systems. The installation process goes as such... First install GHC and Haskell Platform (you need root for these following steps) $ wget http://sherkin.justhub.org/el5/RPMS/x86_64/justhub-release-2.0-4.0.el5.x86_64.rpm $ rpm -ivh justhub-release-2.0-4.0.el5.x86_64.rpm $ yum install haskell The RPM's don't place the files in /usr/bin, so you must add the following to your .bashrc (from here on you don't need root if you don't want things to be system wide) $ export PATH=/usr/hs/bin:$PATH Once the packages are installed and are in your execution path, using cabal to configure and build git-annex just makes life easier, it should install all the needed dependancies. $ cabal update $ git clone git://git.kitenet.net/git-annex $ cd git-annex $ make git-annex.1 $ cabal configure $ cabal build $ cabal install Or if you want to install it globallly for everyone (otherwise it will get installed into $HOME/.cabal/bin) $ cabal install --global The above will take a while to compile and install the needed dependancies. I would suggest any user who does should run the tests that comes with git-annex to make sure everything is functioning as expected. I haven't had a chance or need to install git-annex on a SL6 based system yet, but I would assume something similar to the above steps would be required to do so. The above is almost a cut and paste of , the above could probably be refined, it was what worked for me on SL5. Please feel free to re-edit and chop out or add useless bits of text in the above! Note: from the minor testing, it appears the compiled binaries from SL5 will work on SL6.