FYI, I have sucessfully installed CF 4.5.1 and 5 on e-smith. (CF5 is real easy, because it has an RPM, which works pretty well).
The only caveat is that, because the installers are geared for RH, it expects the default apache dir to be:
/home/httpd/html (for CF 4.5.1) or
/var/www/html (for CF 5)
Although it supposedly will work with another directory (ie. the normal e-smith primary web) I found that it doesn't. So to get it to work I just had to change the primary web to the directory it was expecting (in the apache conf files). Besides that, I had no other problems.