I’ve been soley developing in Microsoft products since I started developing, so this transition has been a slow one for me.   I’ll share my pains in the hopes I can help someone else.

Installing the LAMP stack on Amazon can be a breeze if you do it right.  Read these instructions for a quick setup with a VNC access.  I’ll briefly outline the steps from base install to solr:

• Do yourself a favour and download the Firefox extention
• When you create an instance of a server you have a long list of pre-installed packages to choose from- find the Hardy Ubuntu AMI
• Install the LAMP stack using the command prompt (see link above) it also installed PHPMySql
• For the newest Java install I used the Add Program options in the GUI, real simple
• I downloaded solr from the site and followed the instructions on the site, worked like a charm

My path was riddled with many different dead ends when installing this, but in the end it could have been a 1 hour job.  My main stumbling block was getting vncserver to run with the amazon getting-started AMI builds.  Essentially I had to install everything manually, which is NO fun.

Next steps: trying to get solr to run as a webservice so I can access it internally.  Right now it is behind the 8983 port and I can’t access it from the web.  I’ll let you know how I get on later, and hopefully I’ll have my proof of concept all completed.