Back in my Fedora days - I liked Fedora + extras + livna.
Did not replace distro packages.

An equivalent for livna does not really exist for CentOS - I use EPEL for most add-ons but for patent stuff like multimedia and video drivers, have to use rpmforge, and this make updates a real pain in the * because I either have to have a long list of excludes, or use priorities - which results in weirdness too because some rpmforge packages need stuff that is newer than what epel has.

I just did an update cycle. rpmforge failed due to a bunch of dependency stuff, so I disabled rpmforge and successfully updated base and epel. Upon reboot, X server would not start. Something about the update killed the soft kmod. There was an update for the nvidia driver in rpmforge but enabling that repo and just updating that failed, completely removing it and (via yum remove) and then installing the rpmforge update worked. Rebooted and had X11 again - but now google earth will not run, just gives me a black screen instead of earth. glxgears works and glxinfo says direct rendering is enabled.

Anyone have a clue?

And can anyone suggest a third party repo I can use instead of rpmforge that does not want to replace stock perl modules or conflict with EPEL, something similar to what livna provided for fedora?

If I wanted to manually mess with package conflicts, I'd run rawhide and not CentOS - I'm really getting sick of it, and getting sick of things being broken because of it.

I need google earth.

Maybe you should complain to EPEL.
http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories

Personally instead of livna I would use rpmfusion with epel that works out really well for me and may give you less headaches. Also I wouldn't install nvidia from any of the repo's I would build it myself. This has never really seemed to work quite right on any of the rpm based distro's I have ever used so to me its just easier if i build it myself.

As far as google earth I cannot say much I have never used it. But may i suggest running it from a terminal and see if that gives you any output or an error of some kind, that way you can at least have something to go on, or at least give you a starting point to try and debug things.

The google-earth is solved - the rpmforge update to nvidia driver changed the packaging with the proper obsoletes which is why I had to remove the old driver before installing the update, and I forgot to install 32-bit version of new nvidia driver (figured that out when Adobe Reader also wouldn't work) AND then I had to manually run /sbin/ldconfig (I should NEVER have to do that when installing/updating via rpm) but I still would like to know if there is a 3rd party repo designed to NOT conflict with EPEL that has the multimedia stuff.

I use to just rebuild livna packages myself but that is no longer an option, hence my headaches.

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I have to look at it again - last time (few months ago) it has almost nothing that wasn't testing.