I bumped into a myriads of obstacles setting up the JForex trading platform on an Amazon AWS's free t1.micro intance. I will go through the steps I went through to setup a cloud server for JForex in this post. In the end, I find out that the t1.micro instance chokes up from running the GNOME desktop environment on Ubuntu Maverick. I enabled Amazon's CloudMonitor utility and the CPU measurement is locked at 100% from running the JForex platform and the desktop. This is expected as I suspected that the t1.micro wouldn't be able to handle all that graphics display. I chose to run Ubuntu on EC2 because that's what I'm familiar with at home. I also considered running CentOS because it is legendary as an enterprise server. Yet I read reviews from individuals running their own private VPS saying that CentOS is very secure but it is too "tight-assed". As JForex needs a relatively recent commercial Sun Java version to run, I chose a easier Linux distro for my EC2 instance. A minor gripe I have with Ubuntu is that their EBS Amazon Machine Image (AMI) comes in 15 GB. Whereas the free offer from Amazon only provides 10 GB of free EBS use. So there's a 5 GB extra that will be charged on a monthly basis. This has been discussed on the developer forum and it looks as though subsequent versions of Ubuntu release AMI will be in 10GB. However, this 5 GB amounts to only \$0.55 a month. Still, I want free! I started out my trial on EC2 using the server variant of Ubuntu. It has less clutter and potentially more secure than the regular desktop variant. However, getting remote desktop running on the server took me two evenings to figure out! My problem is in getting a NX server to work. I tried the commercial, but free, nxserver from NoMachine. I tried the GPL implementation, FreeNX. And I tried Google's open source adaptation, Neatx. It just wouldn't work! As soon as I solved one problem something else breaks. At first it was an authentication problem because the SSH keys were mixed between the NX server and SSH server. Then once that's resolved, the desktop just wouldn't start and without any error message to tell me what's wrong. That's when I gave up on NX and switched to using X2go. It only took me a few minutes to install X2go. It ran fine fresh from installation. So many hours wasted on NX. Once I had my remote desktop running, I tried to install Sun Java for JForex. After a few failed attempts, I found out about this problem. Apparently there's a kernel bug on Ubuntu in which installing Sun Java on a t1.micro would crash the installer. Just my luck. By then my curiosity waned and it's just a matter of getting the job done. So I restarted the whole setup process yet another time with a Ubuntu 10.10 desktop edition (has been using server edition) 64-bit (to circumvent the Sun Java installation bug), installed Sun Java, Google Chrome, and X2go. Logged in to the remote desktop through X2go. Launched Chrome to access the Dukascopy website. Started JForex. It takes only a few minutes once I know what I'm doing. Then I watched the t1.micro instance come to a crawl. There's my first attempt at running JForex on a free t1.micro. My recommendation? Don't do it.