Enterprise Linux Distributions (RHEL, CentOS and variants) put a lot of emphasis on running the most stable version of packages which leads to most sites having to run outdated versions of LAMP stacks. While this is not a rant and I fully support the Red Hat policy (remember the clones just rebuild the source) sometimes you need to run a newer version and depending on your distro, you may easily find a repo (Remi and EPEL comes to my mind) and upgrade. We now have a new player in the field, Powerstack which states that it is focused on Enterprise Server Environment. While I haven’t been able to find out who is behind the repo and what type of enterprise support we are talking about I have given the repo a try and it seems to play nicely. Now do you trust Powerstack to the level of EPEL to put it into production is up to you but should you want to use it, fire a shell and as root run:

rpm -Uvh http://download.powerstack.org/powerstack-release-0-1.noarch.rpm

After that installing packages like httpd or php should show the latest versions.

Interestingly the full package list shows many backported packages from RHEL6 and packages from the Remi Collet Repo.

The binaries are said to striped and compiled with optimized GCC flags to improve perfomance: less size = more speed

Other key features includes restarting services after RPM upgrade (remember that Red Hat does not restart services, an advantage if you manage hundreds of Linux server with a centralized software like Spacewalk).

And of course the PowerStack code is free software! Check it out at GitHub.

Disclaimer: Have fun but if you’re worried about 100% binary compatibility with RHEL use yum plugins to protect the base or anything you may want to keep unchanged before fiddling with external repos.