The download link leads to the v2.5.6 release tag of the iotaledger/wallet project. I’ll look at the README for instructions.

Electron is a project created by Github that lets coders create desktop apps using the same technologies they use to make websites. This means I need to run IOTA on a Linux Desktop with a graphical interface.

I haven’t ran an Ubuntu Desktop installation for a while so I’ll follow a guide I found.

AWS means Amazon Web Services. EC2 means Elastic Compute Cloud. They really like acronyms.

I start an Ubuntu 16.04 machine on Amazon AWS.

Even though IOTA is for smaller IoT devices I might need a more powerful machine to compile from source-code. I notice most of the code is Java so I’ll probably need a lot of RAM.

A machine with 4 CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM should be fine.

The machine is running. I’ll connect to it and follow the guide for installing the graphical interface.

Ready to rock!

With brevity in mind I have left out the steps for installing the graphical interface for Ubuntu.

I now have Linux with a graphical interface running. I return to the IOTA wallet install instructions.

I can’t get the clipboard on my laptop to transfer to the Ubuntu Desktop for pasting commands. I’ll continue using SSH until I need the graphical interface.

First, I need to install Node.js.

Next I need Electron and Bower. Bower is a package manager.

The -g passed to NPM means install globally as opposed to in the correct directory.

Even bower doesn’t recommend bower.

I’ve never installed Electron Builder before and will need to read its instructions.

electron-builder 's readme recommends using yarn instead of npm to install. yarn is an alternative to npm created by Facebook.

At least I can install yarn with npm . Inception!

And then electron-builder .

I don’t understand why the instructions say to install Docker. I’ll wait a bit with that. Docker lets you run programs in isolation so that any change they make to your machine is gone when you stop the program.

I download the IOTA wallet source-code and switch to the v2.5.6 version of the code.

The instructions tell me to install something called IRI.

I look for what IRI is.

IRI is an acronym for IOTA Reference Implementation. It’s written in Java and was first put on Github in October 2016:

There have been over 1,300 commits (code changes) to IRI since then. The recent activity is quite modest.

The majority of the work is by a user named paulhandy with the project activity peaking in April 2017. I’m trying to find if there has been an ICO.

According to their Bitcointalk posts the IOTA team is a Norwegian company and raised funds with something called JINN. I’ve never heard of JINN.

I need to install Java 8 and Maven to compile IRI.

I haven’t installed Maven for Linux before and will need to find some instructions. Maven is a program that builds other programs.

I’ve now installed Maven and can compile IRI.

I now have the iri.jar file that’s required by the IOTA wallet and can get back to the wallet.

And install the wallet dependencies:

I’ll switch back to the graphical interface to start the wallet.

And then I’ll start the wallet from the terminal.

OBJECTIVE PASSED!

Compile and run IOTA from source-code on a server

I’ll of course run a full node.

I tried clicking Start, but get the error message that I need neighbors first.

I’ll need some peers to connect to. These are called neighbors. The documentation says to find neighbors on their Slack chat.