I have been using a CentOS 6.4 vm locally for testing and didn't hit any issues.  I believe the reason for this (and the solution to your previous timing issues) is to do with the:

    package package_name do
       action :install
    end.run_action(:install)

The build-essential cookbook has a good description of this <https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/build-essential#usage>

However looks like I combined both.  The ```action :install``` on the package is not needed since the ```end.run_action(:install)``` will install the packages at compile_time.  ```chef_gem``` is also a compile-time action.  I'll correct the ```action :install``` part and re-test locally and amend this PR.