I just wanted to let everyone know that [url=http://xiphos.org]Xiphos 3.1[/url] (formerly gnomesword) and [url=http://www.crosswire.org/sword/index.jsp]Sword 1.6[/url] are now available for CentOS 5.4, in the epel-testing repository. \o/ I was on the lookout for it, because I'm on the sword mailing list -- I wasn't sure what repo it'd end up in, I just searched for xiphos until it showed up.
I wasn't sure where to put this, as it's not really a support question. And while it's software related, there may be some comments or discussion that would be more along the lines of 'social' so I thought I'd save the moderators some work and start it off here.
Here's some wiki info. about adding repositories: http://wiki.centos.org/AdditionalResources/Repositories
Scroll down to the heading for 3rd party repositories and then look for Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)
You'll want to enable 'epel-testing' to get Xiphos and Sword (and it pulls in lucene and a couple of other dependencies).
I've used it a little bit over the last week or so since I installed it, though I've spent most of my time on the Fedora 12 beta. I've done a few searches, cut & pasted some things to the study pad and it worked well. I like it much better than the gnomesword I installed on my Fedora7 laptop. It also saw some modules I'd downloaded and had in /usr/share/sword, and I've downloaded a couple modules and that worked just fine. Of course those downloads are going to my ~/home /.sword directory and it won't let me select /usr/share/sword but that's probably a permissions thing. The module manager does tell you where to find them, so you can do a backup.
So for those of you who are looking for Bible software for CentOS without having to install and configure Wine and eSword (which I didn't get to work for me...) here it is! Yay!
I also realized I should add, I'm not the maintainer, or packager, or developer; I just wanted to share the news with those who may be interested.