cvs setup question

[Jude DaShiell]

Given an out of the box Linux installation, what needs to be done to cvs 
before logging onto the braille.uwo.ca cvs server and checking out 
projects like socrates and listen-up?  What I figured might be possible 
after that short server type installation was to go into each disks RPMS 
directory and do rpm -ivh * --nodeps and whatever files failed the rpm 
test would be failed by verification.  Then I figured to use yum and do 
yum install * to get files I didn't already have because those had errored 
out back on the rpm command and install those files, then I'd have a 
complete FC2 installation if not necessarily having gone through the 
normal installation process.