Mageia2 on EC2: Flying in a different direction

At $WORK, we make the claim that as a client's systems oversight service, we are "distribution agnostic" - meaning we'll help you out regardless of what Linux distribution you're running. Most of the time, we work with Ubuntu, RHEL, CentOS or Amazon Linux. However, a client recently decided on running Mageia2 GNU/Linux on Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud, so I had to pick up the challenge.

Now as far as distributions go, it seems to me that Mageia is "ok" - a fork of Mandriva that has a nice community developed around it. Unfortunately, what hasn't developed in any interest in running it on EC2. There seems to be a few VPS providers that support it, but not any of the popular ones that I know of. Still, AWS EC2 has the capability of running your own Linux distribution and even your own kernel so I pushed up my sleeves and dug into getting it going. As there's a lot to this configuration, I will break this down over a few posts. Here is an outline:

1. Boarding procedures - performing a chroot install on a local Mageia system 
2. Stormy weather - recompiling the Linux kernel to get Mageia running on EC2
3. Cruising altitude - performing another chroot install for an EBS backed instance

I'll be posting sanitized code samples and links to the key documents that explain the steps.

EDIT 2/7/2013: I've put the code samples up on github.