Creation of a high-memory, low disk instance with a full Fedora Workstation desktop experience. (t2.large EC2 instance 2 Processors, 8GB RAM) Designed for a low-cost, next level up replacement of a powerful desktop. An order of magnitude below big data, and an order of magnitude more capable than a 2013 era laptop.

Or skip to the bottom for just the Wordpress on a free tier micro instance instructions.

Launch a Fedora 28 Cloud Base Images for Amazon Public Cloud.

As of 2018-11-05 13:28 Fedora no longer provides links to the images for use with amazon, the best approach is:

EC2 -> Launch Instance -> Community AMIs -> Fedora -> 
Fedora-Cloud-Base-28-20180930.0.x86_64-hvm-us-east-1-gp2-0 - ami-0047163812982e5f3

Connect to the instance with:

ssh \
    -i your_key_pair.pem \
    -L 4010:localhost:4000 \
    -R 6622:localhost:22 \
    fedora@amazon-ec2-public-dnsname

dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

dnf update -y
dnf group install "GNOME Desktop Environment"
dnf install w3m
reboot

timedatectl set-timezone America/New_York
reboot

# If you don't reboot after changing the timezone, it will lockup
# randomly


After reboot, install nomachine:

    w3m 'https://www.nomachine.com/download/linux&id=1'
    (Download the 'plain' x86_64 linux nomachine)

    vi /etc/selinux/config
    change 'enforcing' to 'permissive'

    dnf install ./nomachine*

    #  Change the fedora password so nomachine clients can login
    sudo su - 
    passwd fedora
    exit

    # If you get a message about the connection being terminated before
    # you ever see a desktop, and when you start gnome-session manually
    # you get a 'terminated' error, try install tigervnc server first,
    # then run the vncserver command, then connect with the nomachine
    # commands below. In practice this looks like:
    dnf install tigervnc-server
    vncserver 
    # (choose password)
    # Then on every reboot:
    vncserver; sleep 10; sudo systemctl restart nxserver

    # As of 2018-12-07 21:03 this will cause a lockup on the FC28 cloud
    # micro instance. If you increase the instance size to medium you
    # can login to the vncserver session first, then restart the
    # nxserver without causing the lockup.

    # Connect to the nomachine instance through the tunnel on port 4010
    # If nomachine says no desktop created, check the box for "Always
    # create"

    # On first connect, you may have to change the nomachine resolution to
    # 1920x1080. Don't change it in the client, change it in the nomachine
    # settings.

You should now have a full Fedora Workstation in the cloud that will start a new desktop session with Gnome automatically on nomachine connection. Use the script below to establish a tunnel over port 4010 to nomachine, and ssh back to the local system.

From this stage, follow the standard dotfiles configuration.

#!/bin/bash
# Launch the instance, get the new ip address, establish an autossh
# tunnel to the AMI
# Use aws cli or the web interface to get your machines' instance id,
# replace the variable below:

INSTANCEID=i-GUID
export PATH=/home/nharrington/miniconda3/bin:$PATH
source activate conda_awscli

aws ec2 start-instances \
    --instance-ids $INSTANCEID \
    --output=text

QRY="Reservations[*].Instances[*].[InstanceId,PublicDnsName,Tags\
[?Key==\`Application\`].Value]"

DNSNAME=`aws ec2 describe-instances \
                --instance-ids=$INSTANCEID \
                --query $QRY \
                --output=text \
                | awk '{print $2}'`

echo $DNSNAME

autossh \
    -M 36622 \
    -oStrictHostKeyChecking=no \
    -i lls_key_pair.pem \
    -L 8839:localhost:5901 \
    -L 4010:localhost:4000 \
    -R 6622:localhost:22 \
    fedora@$DNSNAME

Looking for wordpress on amazon? Just use bitnami image, then add the elementor plugin: