I only see debian and RHEL images displayed ... What if I want to run ubuntu 12.04 or something else? Is there a way to invoke a debian instance and install ubuntu 12.04 on top of it and create my own image?
Since the launch of General Availability, you can use standard kernels with the Compute Engine.
Paul Rashidi has published detailed steps to create a FreeBSD image . You must create an Ubuntu image from scratch by following the same steps.
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Ubuntu Canonical Google GCE Ubuntu.
, GCE.
Google Offers Images for Debian 7, CentOS 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11. Windows Server 2008 R2 Coming Soon
You can also create your own images.