General Failure

 There are other installation guides: CentOS 5.2/64bit, CentOS5.4 and one from Magento forum. This is another take on the matter.

1. Install 32bit  server-gui CentOS 5.4, with SELinux on permissive
2. yum update
3. yum install mysql-server, and remember set the password as instructed! Also starting the server and configuring it to start on boot might be a good idea. 
4. Install ZendServer
   1. Create a file /etc/yum.repos.d/zend.repo with*
   2. yum clean all
   3. yum install zend-server-ce-php-5.3
   4. /usr/local/zend/gui_passwd.sh
   5. /usr/local/zend/bin/zendctl.sh restart
5. create mysql-database for magento: mysqladmin -u root -p create magento
6. connect the database mysql -u root -p magento
7. create user: create user 'magento'@'localhost' identified by 'yourpasswordhere';
8. grant privileges: grant all privileges on magento.* to 'magento'@'localhost' with grant option;
9. Fetch the magento package
10. untar it to the /var/www/html
11. Set permissions: setfacl -R -m user:apache:rwx media  var app/etc/
12. Browse to your server/magento to start the installation. The only catch now is the socket, it is /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

*

[Zend]

name=Zend Server

baseurl=http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/rpm/$basearch

enabled=1

gpgcheck=0

[Zend_noarch]

name=Zend Server - noarch

baseurl=http://repos.zend.com/zend-server/rpm/noarch

enabled=1

gpgcheck=0