These instructions detail compiling and installing freeswitch under centos 5.x. It should be noted that this was done successfully under a xen vm hosted at linode.
yum -y install subversion autoconf automake libtool gcc-c++ ncurses-devel make
mkdir /usr/src/freeswitch
cd /usr/src/freeswitch
svn co http://svn.freeswitch.org/svn/freeswitch/tags/1.0.2/
cd 1.0.2
./bootstrap.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/freeswitch
make
make install
make sounds-install
make moh-install
cd build
cp freeswitch.init.redhat /etc/init.d/freeswitch
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/freeswitch
useradd -c 'Freeswitch User' -s /sbin/nologin fsuser
vim /etc/init.d/freeswitch
FS_USER=fsuser