Amazon's documentation seems to assume that everyone using it knows all about X509 certificates and exactly how to generate them. I don't, and no one on the internet seems to be interested in explaining how to do the minimum to generate an X509 certificate that works with EC2. What, exactly and in very specific steps, is necessary to generate an X509 certificate that works with EC2? The target environment for these steps is Ubuntu 12.04.
Edit: Note that I cannot simply use the 'Generate X509 certificate' tab, because this is an IAM account.