Some basic things to do right from the start. Makes things a lot easier later during config.

Disable firewall

service iptables off
chkconfig iptables off

Disable selinux

setenforce permissive
edit /etc/selinux/config:
SELINUX=disabled
reboot 

edit /etc/profile
alias emacs="emacs -nw"

Enable Epel and Remi repositories

In /usr/local:

wget http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/x86_64/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

rpm -Uvh epel-release-6*.rpm

yum install epel-release

wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/enterprise/remi-release-6.rpm

rpm -Uvh remi-release-6*.rpm