Thanks for all the pointers. I finally successfully installed on Amazon Linux stock AMI (this makes me feel better because Amazon offers paid support for that platform).
It is a Centos 5.5 (at the time of this posting). The problem is that the ruby distro code referenced in the couchio installation instructions: https://github.com/couchone/build-couchdb does not have an allowance for CentOS. I have encluded the needed change to make the Centos distro look like fedora (which is what they recommend for Red Hat in the instructions - FYI Centos is an opensource version of Red Hat). You need to login to the Amazon Linux instance you have created from the AWS Management Console (instructions for that are not included here). I have only tried 32bit, but plan to try 64bit later today. Login as "ec2-user". Then the procedure is as follows: sudo yum install gcc gcc-c++ libtool curl-devel ruby-rdoc zlib-devel openssl-devel wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/rubygems-1.3.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/rubygem-rake-0.8.7-2.el5.noarch.rpm sudo rpm -ivh rubygem-rake-0.8.7-2.el5.noarch.rpm rubygems-1.3.1-1.el5.noarch.rpm ruby --version curl sudo yum install git-core git clone git://github.com/couchone/build-couchdb cd build-couchdb/ git submodule init git submodule update nano tasks/distros.rb --- Go to the bottom of the file and comment out "nil" and add the line shown. #nil return [:fedora, '5.5'] rake build/bin/couchdb -- now couchdb should be running - George
