Today it has been one of those infrastructure days, I have tried to launch an instance of an EC2 Amazon virtual machine and install all the requirements required for Theano and Lasagne python packages but as expected I have had some problems.

My first try was to use a micro instance of Linux (because it is free) but errors aroused installing matplotlib which was a dependency of the above packages. Finally I was able to install it with apt-get install python-matplotlib if I remember correctly and after some tweaks here and there the packages were working and the Lasagne Hello World was running… Then? What was the problem? Well, the script was taking ages to complete and eventually the terminal disconnected because of errors.

Eventually I launched the recommended instance of the tutorial and the Lasagne script worked as a charm (I just needed to spend some money!).

Things I’ve learned today

  • Spot Instances in Amazon are cheaper but they cannot be stopped
  • Using PuTTY to connect through SSH to an EC2 Linux instance is straightforward if you have your Key. Just remember to use the proper identifier and public IP.
  • Installing matplotlib on Linux is not as straightforward as expected.

Tomorrow I will carry on working on the Tutorial. Wish me good luck!