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 GHC packages are installed and are in your execution path, using cabal to build git-annex just makes life easier, it should install all the needed dependancies. See "minimal build with cabal and stackage" in [[fromsource]] for instructions.