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I use Fedora as my home machine and thus wanted to use Centos 6.0 linux as amazon EC2 instance. Here is the thing though - Amazon gives you long list of very unscientifically sorted instances, some of them as I understand Centos 6.0:

158864314994/mesos-hypertable-centos-6 944964708905/rightimage_centos_6.0_i386_20110810.1_ebs 944964708905/rightimage_centos_6.0_86x64_20110810.1_ebs 452552107804/Bayscribe-SearchServer2-CentOS6-EBS_9-8 452552107804/Bayscribe-SearchServer2-CentOS6-EBS_9-9

or something like this.

What do I have to do to get my beloved standard minimal netinstall of Centos 6.0?

Does Amazon maintains official images? because how do I know if these 3-rd party images don't contain some malicious crap?

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The official "Amazon Linux" AMIs are binary compatible with CentOS (presumably they are based on CentOS) so should be very familiar to you if that is your preferred distro.

A few trusted third parties like RightScale also publish CentOS AMIs.

You are correct to not trust random AMIs found in the general list. Always start at the site of a trusted AMI publisher to get the AMI id. Just because an AMI says "rightimage" doesn't mean it was published by RightScale.

Affiliation disclosure: RightScale sponsors my personal tech blog, http://Alestic.com

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  • i see. yep. rightscale was the one I've tried - but on their site it says that it still in alpha. also -rightscale probably includes their software into that image which I don't want.
    – Stann
    Sep 12, 2011 at 22:48
  • I'm pretty sure the "alpha" might be an old label and many companies are using RightScale CentOS AMIs in production environments. I also believe that the extra hooks that RightScale adds to their images should not interfere with normal operation if you are not running it from within the RightScale tools. That said, if you are not using the RightScale service, then you might as well go with Amazon Linux if you like CentOS. Sep 13, 2011 at 2:20
  • The Amazon Linux images aren't completely compatible; they use different names for some system RPMs, so some 3rd pty RPMs won't work. You can't just add PostgreSQL's yum.postgresql.org repositories, for example. Also, they have some ... interesting ... packaging choices; see people.planetpostgresql.org/andrew/index.php?/archives/… Nov 6, 2012 at 5:25
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Yes, they maintain official images and it's recommended to use them unless you know the source is a reputable provider. Here is the link to browse their official images.

UPDATE: Sorry, I misread your question as to what you meant by official images. One suggestion might be to make your own AMI from a local VirtualBox or VMWare instance, there is some documentation here.

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  • I see. I knew about amazon ami. but I was hoping for rather official centos ami. But I guess there isn't one. Thanks anyway Turnkey.
    – Stann
    Sep 12, 2011 at 15:24

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