You can change SELinux and firewall settings by running:

sudo system-config-securitylevel

Mercurial is not available in yum. Supposedly it can be easily installed if you have the easy_install python tool, but I didn’t have that setup.

Building from source is easy, but requires an extra step:

wget http://mercurial.selenic.com/release/mercurial-1.3.1.tar.gz
tar xzf mercurial-1.3.1.tar.gz
cd mercurial-1.3.1
sudo make install

add to ~/.bash_profile

PYTHONPATH=/usr/local/lib64/python2.4/site-packages:${PYTHONPATH}
export PYTHONPATH

To install mysql on Centos:

sudo yum install -y mysql mysql-server
sudo /etc/init.d/mysqld start
sudo chkconfig --level 345 mysqld on ## To auto start at boot

To set a static IP address (ie for a new VM from stacklet.com)

nano /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0

DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
ONBOOT=yes
TYPE=Ethernet
IPADDR=192.168.246.30
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=192.168.246.254

Then: ifdown eth0; ifup eth0

Or, to run from the command line:

ifconfig eth0 192.168.99.14 netmask 255.255.255.0 up

To configure name server:

cat > /etc/resolv.conf
search local cs.umass.edu
nameserver 128.119.240.1