Installing Linux kernel headers for Amazon EC2 Ubuntu instances

When you play around with Ubuntu EC2 instances on AWS you might, at one point, stumble upon needing to install the Linux kernel headers to build some kernel module(s) from source. However, the standard Ubuntu repositories do not offer the -xen images used to build those AMI's:

# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Couldn't find package linux-headers-2.6.27-23-xen

You should try to use the Ubuntu EC2 PPA packages for the Xen kernels — e.g.  you may use the following:

# echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ubuntu-on-ec2/ppa/ubuntu YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE main" >/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-on-ec2.list
# apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 9EE6D873
# apt-get update
# apt-get install linux-headers-`uname -r`

Don't forget to replace "YOUR_UBUNTU_VERSION_HERE" with your own Ubuntu flavour (hardy/intrepid).

Slides and Audio from EuroBSDCon 2009

For those of you who missed the talks or want to remember some of the things said, the slides and some audio recordings (only Stream A sessions) have been made available on the EuroBSDCon 2009 website.

While at it you may want to check out the EnterpriseBSD introduction slides that I presented in the Works-In-Progess session -- see my blog post on enterprisebsd.com.