Do Not Use Amazon Linux | Hacker News Reader

Do Not Use Amazon Linux

exratione.com

21 pointsexratione12 comments

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.

Red Hat is made to use Red Hat repos. You may have to enable epel or epel-testing for packages that are newer or have software that Red Hat isn't interested in maintaining.

Red Hat also isn't meant to be bleeding edge, it's a very safe, stable server distribution. If you want a desktop use Fedora.

Transmission is in EPEL. So it's just

  su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm'
  su -c 'yum install transmission'

(The first line is just copied and pasted from the EPEL instructions, you don't need to memorise it)

`yum install qbittorent` is as easy as it gets. I have no problems installing Oracle Java with the official RPM binaries as well.

You like using Ubuntu. That's fine and all. But please stop spreading FUD about Red Hat based distros.

TBH on RHEL there is little motivation to use the Java installer from experience. The majority of drops I've seen use a JDK dumped somewhere for that specific app and a wrapper script to set up JAVA_HOME and PATH.

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

> 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.

Conversely, a lot of things "just work" in RHEL/CentOS that are challenging in Ubuntu, especially when it comes to hardware vendor support. If you run on Dell hardware, for example, their firmware update packages only work on RHEL without significant effort.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com