FreeBSD/EC2 -9.0-Current 2011-01-01 (ami-f4db2a9d)

[jflowers]

I'm working my way through a re-education for EC2.  I read a lot of posts 
but find it confusing to keep up with the current state of the art as to 
what information is applicable and what is not:

1. I had convinced myself that I was being told that I had to use a Windows 
instance but then found this AMI.  It launched for T1.micro, always with the 
note that it was available for the free-tier which is important to me.  Have 
I been too optimistic or is it, indeed, running with the free-tier 
restrictions?

2. Unfortunately, after I had spent a couple of hours on installing ports, I 
installed pkgng.  It seemed to install OK but then when I ran pkg2ng it 
didn't work throwing the following error message twice.

/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Undefined symbol "Quiet" referenced from COPY 
relocation in /usr/sbin/pkg_info.

and then ...

Conversion has been successfully finished
Your old packages database has been moved to: /var/db/pkg.bak

There is no sign of a pkg.bak anywhere on the machine and, of course, pkg_* 
tools don't work. /var/db/pkg is still fully populated with what looks like 
the correct files. There is also no perl installed

So my question is "Is there any way I can recover pkg_* tools or get pkgng 
to function?  With only a couple of hours in it, I'm tempted to just start 
over and use one of the RELEASE AMIs.

3. I also noted a thread where Colin Percival talked about an initial launch 
as c1.medium to set things up and then restarting as t1.micro.  Won't this 
trigger a minimum bill for 1 month being added to my free-tier $0.00?

Thanks for any help responses to get me pointed in the right direction.

--
Jim Flowers <jflowers at ezo.net>