I’ve been trying to build Blender from source on CentOS for many years, but never had any luck making it work. There was always one package missing, or something else that needed to be configured. Depressed and resentful, I gave up and never got a chance to try Blender on CentOS.
Recently, the Blender Devs have started releasing a pre-compiled version of Blender for CentOS for download. This should work on RHEL and Fedora just as well. Huzzah!
With a fresh installation of CentOS looking at me from my old Samsung Q330 laptop, I thought I’d try it out. It works great! Here’s what I had to do to make it work, step by step.