Ethereum/Installation

Overview

In the below article i'll be covering how to configure an Ethereum deployment on Ubuntu. Out of the available linux resources out there, Debian based are well supported by Ethereum developers, with some people even setting up a repository software can be easily obtained from.
Regarding Redhat based solutions, most everything I've seen requires you to download the source, compile and make yourself, which is not ideal for any solution long term that you plan on keeping up to date.

With the above mentioned, this article will be based on the latest Ubuntu server build, which at the time of this writing is 16.04.3 LTS.

OS Installation

I've chosen to use a thumbdrive as my hard disk. I do not think that disk speed will affect performance, so i've gone with the cheapest solution i can find that I think will work, an 8GB Sandisk drive straight from China. Mine cost $2.84 shipped, but I see others just like it for $2.99 and some mini 8GB versions (sit almost flush with the USB port) for $1.49 shipped.

Again, I've used Ubuntu Server x64 16.04.3 for the operating system. Make sure to download the right ISO, mine was almost 900MB.

USB Installation

Assuming you are working from a Debain based machine (Ubuntu, Mint, etc), you can download unetbootin from the repos in order to install Ubuntu onto the USB drive.

~$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unetbootin -y

If you wanted to check and make sure it was available in your repos, run a quick search

~$ sudo apt-cache search unetbootin

With unetbootin installed, you can use the GUI to write the ISO to the Flash Drive.
unetbootin is super simple. Select the ISO that you downloaded, the appropriate flash drive, and write!.
If you cant figure that out, maybe another solution like the Simple Miner OS (smOS) is a better choice for you.