RHEL (+ clones like CentOS) is the preferred platform for running MediaDrop because of its long-term support and high-quality packages.
MediaDrop runs on RHEL 5 and 6 as well as any support version of Fedora.
If you don’t have a working MySQL server ready you should install the required packages:
yum install mysql mysql-server
Please note that you need to secure your install, grant a MySQL user with sufficient privileges and create a new database for MediaDrop. However these procedures are out of scope for this documentation.
yum install gcc libjpeg-devel zlib-devel freetype-devel python-devel mysql-devel
yum install python-setuptools
virtualenv is not part of RHEL’s standard package set. You can either install install it manually (see the ‘Installation’ section on virtualenv’s pypi page) or enable the Fedora EPEL and install the python-virtualenv package.
On Fedora you can just install virtualenv using yum:
# RHEL with Fedora EPEL enabled or plain Fedora!
yum install python-virtualenv
Please note that you need virtualenv < 1.8 if you plan to use Python 2.4 (RHEL 5).
RHEL 5.x comes with Python 2.4. While MediaDrop 0.10 still works with Python 2.4 support for that old version of Python (released initially in November 2004) will be dropped eventually. Also some plugins might not work with 2.4.
The recommend setup on RHEL 5 is to install Python 2.6 through Fedora EPEL. The EPEL Python package does not replace the RHEL-provided Python 2.4 and therefore won’t affect the rest of the system.
After you enabled Fedora EPEL you can install the required Python 2.6 packages:
yum install python26 python26-devel python26-setuptools python26-virtualenv
Also later in the install docs you must use python26 wherever the docs say python. Also virtualenv must be replaced by virtualenv-2.6. And last but not least you need to install the python26-mod_wsgi for production deployments.