Little did I know this would be a 5 hour long journey through rpm hell, failed dependencies, yum repository management, and who knows what else. Heck, I didn’t even succeed completely, but I did manage to get Erlang up and running. Whew. CouchDB, I’ll come back to you later.

Anyways, to save anyone who is trying to do this a whole lot of time – don’t worry about rpms, yum repos, any of that crap. Go here. No wait, better yet go here. The CEAN project packages and distributes binaries for OTP/Erlang as well as binaries for a whole slew of applications. It’s a nice framework and easily updated. Simply SSH into your media temple dv and grab the binary with:

wget http://cean.process-one.net/pub/R11B/prod/linux-x86/cean_installer.bin

Make sure and give the installer executable status:

chmod +x cean_installer.bin

Then execute it:

./cean_installer.bin

Voila – you now have Erlang installed and running on your Media Temple Dedicated Virtual. At the time of this writing the latest Erlang release is R12B-2, but CEAN distributes R11B.