Julia packages tend to use system packages when they are available via yum, apt-get, etc.... If you run into a package that does not use yum when it should, and it doesn't install properly, open an issue on that package's issue tracker, (you can usually find the Github repository for any given package by just googling for it. The ".jl" at the end of our package names disambiguates our packages from everything else really well) and feel free to call my attention to the build issue by including "@staticfloat" in the issue text.
In general however, I would expect most packages to "just work", even if they need to be compiled. The reason Julia was failing is because our basic linear algebra library, OpenBLAS, tries to make explicit use of new CPU instructions that your version of gcc does not understand. For more "normal" code, this shouldn't be a problem. -E
