Starting up a custom operating system

The instructions in Start up an EC2 instance tell you how to start up a machine with Ubuntu Linux version 14.04 on it, but that machine comes with very little software installed. For anything where you are executing actual analyses, you’re going to want to have a bunch of basic software installed.

Therefore, we make custom versions of Ubuntu available as well, that come with some software pre-installed.

To boot these, go to EC2/Launch and select “Community AMIs” instead of the default “Quick Start”;

Then type in the AMI number or name in the search box. We need to use:

ami-d25283ba

for this whole workship. Or you can just type “MSU” in the search box and hit ENTER. “MSU 2014 QB Summer Course” is the one needed.

Then proceed with the rest of Start up an EC2 instance.