Thanks for your help with the Debian 7.
For some reasont the /etc/apt/sources.list just had the deb-cdrom and the deb for security package
I added the deb
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/ wheezy main line to the file
Then I did
aptitude update
And was able to install checkinstall on Debian.
On the other hand I'm still unable to install checkinstall package on CentOS 6.5
I installed the RPM forge repositories following the instructions of this page
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalRes...ories/RPMForge
And as you can see in this link
http://pkgs.repoforge.org/
The checkinstall package appears listed in the repository or RPM but it doesn't show with a
yum list checkinstall
command.
I also installed the rpmfusion repositories with no success so far.