

Do Not Use Amazon Linux - exratione
https://www.exratione.com/2014/08/do-not-use-amazon-linux/

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PaulHoule
I like the Ubuntu Linux distributions not just because of the "lock in"
issues, but a lot of things "just work" with Ubuntu that are difficult with
Red Hat.

For instance there is a Sun Java installer that "just works" with Ubuntu and
will keep your Sun Java up to date when you do your system updates. If you
need a Bit Torrent client you can just

apt-get install transmission

but it turns out to be quite an exercise to compile and install any Bit
Torrent client for Red Hat Linux.

I remember how Solaris was the center of the open source world in 1991, but by
2001 it was starting to get hard to compile things on Solaris. Red Hat is also
diverging from the open source mainstream and it is "just hard" to do things
that "just work" with Ubuntu.

~~~
donniezazen
Sun Java is no longer available on Ubuntu from the official repository as a
part of ubuntu-restricted-extra. Installing Oracle Java on any distribution
would be same amount of work. Here are my notes[1] on how to install Oracle
Java on Fedora 20.

I find it a little weird that you would be using a bittorrent client on an
enterprise Linux solution. On Fedora, you just have to do yum install
transmission-qt to install Transmission Qt version.

[1][https://github.com/donniezazen/fedora#java](https://github.com/donniezazen/fedora#java)

~~~
derefr
> I find it a little weird that you would be using a bittorrent client on an
> enterprise Linux solution.

If you've ever had to run an instance of bitcoind in the cloud (as any web
exchange/wallet/etc. product will have to do), you end up either getting your
nodes to torrent a copy of the blockchain, or burning it into your AMI. A
twenty-hour download/verification step every time you scale up new instances
is just impractical.

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hammerdr
I didn't get this at first, but the author was saying that CentOS is not a
suitable substitute _to emulate Amazon Linux in development environments_.
It's very reasonable to use CentOS as both development and production
environments on EC2.

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ademarre
I've abstained from Amazon Linux for the same reasons: to evade vendor lockin
and facilitate cleaner non-EC2 dev environments.

Though I think Docker improves the situation by decoupling applications from
their host environment.

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na85
On the subject of (re)creating Amazon Linux outside of EC2, under the terms of
the GNU Public License are they not required to distribute the source code to
any paying customer who asks?

~~~
Daviey
No, paying for it is irrelevant. Something along the lines of claiming that
keeping the binaries inside the infra means that it isn't distributed.
However, they do allow some odd access with authenticated requests called
something like 'git-reference-source' which provides some. Details are a
little hazy.

