My experience with Chef on CentOS 5 recently confirmed this is still a beta product. The bootstrap instructions are incomplete, leaving you hanging half-way down the page at "CentOS 5.x users will need to have version 4.2 or better of gcc in order for this to function. This may be a newer version of gcc than that which is installed via yum." To finish the installation detour to this page that provides links to the FrameOS RBEL repository and installation instructions for the Chef server that worked for me. After completing the server install return to Bootstrap instructions and resume from ‘Verify All Components are Running’.