I've installed cfengine on a few of the desktops just to better get an idea of how it does the configuration management. Prerequisites to the install were Berkeleydb and Openssl. The latest versions of the Berkeleydb aren't configured properly with the cfengine version 2.1.21 that I used, the latest version that is compatible was version 4.0. You will also need to install the db40-devel and openssl-devel tools for build completion.
There also seems to be some incompatibilities with yacc that are only noticed in the make, so in order to get around this you can install both bison and flex to handle the parsing and compiling.
Then create a directory /opt/cfengine/ an run:
tar zxf cfengine-x.x.x.tar.gz cd cfengine-x.x.x/ ./configure --prefix=/opt/cfengine/ make make install
Note that the final command should be run as root.
