Detailed instructions follow.
First provision a Linux 2 box using the AWS tooling. If you want to run an IDE on it you need 8GB ram and 16 GB hard drive.
Follow these instructions to enable VNC.
At this point you should be able to use VNC to connect to your EC2 machine. I used Real VNC
To change the vnc password for a machine, use ‘vncpasswd’. I usually make it the same as the name of the pem file.
When you’ve got the machine up and running you should be able to open an ssh tunnel to it with a command similar to this one (use your own pem file and ip address):
ssh -L 5901:localhost:5901 -i yourkeyfile.pem ec2-user@ip_address
Install python3:
sudo yum install python3
Install gobject using the commands below. Note: there are instructions here but don’t follow them since they only partially work. The crucial missing step is to install ‘cairo-gobject-devel’ as I discovered from this page. Do this instead:
sudo yum install gcc gobject-introspection-devel cairo-devel pkg-config python3-devel gtk3
sudo yum install cairo-gobject-devel
sudo pip3 install texttest
sudo pip3 install pycairo
sudo pip3 install PyGObject
Now you should be able to connect to the machine with VNC, open a terminal and run texttest --new which should open a new texttest window. Close it for the moment while you install the supporting tools and configure your personal config file as explained below.
The following tools are very useful to have alongside TextTest.
sudo yum install git
Download the rpm and install it. This page lists it, use curl to download it - this page has a link to the actual rpm. For example:
curl https://download-ib01.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/aarch64/Packages/m/meld-3.16.4-2.el7.noarch.rpm > meld.rpm
sudo yum install meld.rpm
See these instructions
Set up your personal texttest config file to use meld and sublime:
view_program:subl
diff_program:meld
Now when you start texttest you should be in a good position to use it to run and develop test cases.