I've used linux for a while now in a production environment but that environment doesn't' give me much customization.

I'm finally using CentOS 5.4 on my home machine.. I am curious what the standard is for repositories?
Are there a few set repositories when using yum?

While I keep finding the correct repositories to install what I need, I am somewhat Leary where some of these repositories are.

Is there a list of repositories that should be used?

Thanks in advance

Take a look at the Centos wiki. It has a good list and the pros/cons of using them. Personally I use rpmforge, elrepo, and epel.

First visit CentOS wiki regarding third party repositories as suggested and then read the rest of this post.

I've made this thread with links to repositories I use to SEARCH for packages. Day to day use came down to enabling centos and extras, and using epel and elrepo. I also put together a small repository with downloaded packages from atrpms-stable, rpmforge and few others.

What ever you do, DO NOT mix atrpms with rpmforge on the daily basis, dependencies are all over the place with that lethal combination.

I am thinking of a branch of CentOS to be used as desktop and having a selection of programs to cover every day usage in that capacity. Point in that direction is plnet-centos-bundle package with dependencies to number of packages missing from original CentOS release. It's in plnet-releases repository, and should be a base for carefully designed set of such packages covering needs of wide variety of CentOS users (with and without proprietary software, etc...).