No subject

is that it defaults to a more modern and appropriate kernel version
(which is part of this beta).  Before this, we were only able to run
against the kernels published by Amazon, but Canonical has worked out a
relationship which lets them build custom Ubuntu kernels for EC2 (and
has put in the hard work to build them).

Insofar as I continue publishing community AMIs after the official
public release, I expect to use the new official kernels with the
unofficial AMIs.

Other things you might want to know if you've been using the Ubuntu
images on http://alestic.com and want to test the official beta images
include:

- beta1 does not have the EC2 AMI tools installed, but beta2 will.

- beta1 has a manual tasksel prompt on first ssh, but beta2 will not.

- beta1 lets you ssh in as root, but beta2 will restrict it to the
"ubuntu" user by default (with appropriate sudo privs) following the
Ubuntu security conventions.

- The user-data startup script does not work in beta1 but will in beta2.

- There are a few minor package differences between the AMIs on
http://alestic.com and the official beta AMIs, but these are again a bit
in flux and you can easily install any you find to be missing.

- The beta only supports Intrepid server.

I expect to eventually phase out support for many of the community AMIs
I build in favor of the official Ubuntu images, though this could take a
long time as I'm currently fond of Hardy LTS which is not in the
official beta.

Please do try out the official beta images and provide feedback.
Canonical has generously included me in the early process and I feel
like I've been able to help a bit, but the more eyes, environments, and
uses the better.

--
Eric Hammond
ehammond at thinksome.com



Keith Cerny wrote:
> Forgive me if this question has already been asked as I am a new member
> of the beta list.
> 
> We currently use the Ubuntu images created by Eric Hammond
> (http://alestic.com) for our EC2 Ubuntu servers. How will the images
> provided through this beta program differ from those created by Alestic?
> Are there any specific gotchas or shortcomings with using the existing
> Alestic images that the beta program is looking to address?
> 
> We will spin up a beta image and try our configuration on it and let you
> know if it works well.
> 
> Thanks,
> Keith
>