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Comment by GnomeChomsky | Hacker News Reader

Any advice for getting started for someone without a Mac? I remember once trying to learn and immediately stalling out during setup (lame, I know). I have WinXP & Ubuntu, and would like to take a stab at this again no matter how stupid I feel about not even being to able to install the damn stuff to start with.

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My advice is to do your development using a Virtual Machine--ideally running the same OS as what your production web server will eventually be running. This gives you the freedom to screw around with your app and server configuration, knowing you can easily roll back to an older version. And it also gives you more confidence that your app will deploy cleanly to your production server and not get hung up on some subtle difference between e.g. Ubuntu and Red Hat.

And, finally, then it doesn't matter whether your host OS is windows or ubuntu; use which you feel most comfortable with.

The Ubuntu and Mac setups should be pretty similar. It will be easier for you to get help developing through Ubuntu than XP. Stackoverflow/IRC are your friends when you run into trouble.

Another thing to look into would be Vagrant (http://vagrantup.com/). You can have all your ruby/rails specific dependencies in a Virtualbox VM and not worry about setting it up in your host OS. It also has the added benefit of easily tearing down the instance if you manage to mess up. There's a learning curve to it, especially when setting up chef recipes, so for starters you could just bake everything into the image

I don't want to sound blunt, but I found the installation process of ruby/python/git on windows to be more painful than necessary. (Last time I tried) It might make sense to try it on Ubuntu as it should be very similar to a mac environment. Good Luck!

Python? Really? There's nothing you need to do after running the installer. It sets up the path and everything. Most of the popular python libraries that require a binary component have windows installers as well.

Ruby is a bit more understandable, if you don't get DevKit (or if DevKit can't compile something) working with gems can be frustrating. And setting up Git on Windows with an SSH key has been awful in the past.

RailsInstaller takes a lot of the pain out of setup, though.

http://railsinstaller.org/ makes it really easy on Windows, though you might find that some of the gems don't work properly.

Another option would be to use something like Vagrant, which gives you a VirtualBox server that's mapped to your local filesystem. So you use the editors you're used to but you have a fairly solid server running the code. If you search around for "vagrant rails" you'll find several pre-built images, along with a RailsCast that explains how it all fits together.

I recommend RailsInstaller as well for Windows users. It is straightforward to set up and I've had no issues so far using it.

When I get more experience in Rails though, I'll probably switch over to using a Mac.

Use Mac Leopard, and don't switch from 32 bit to 64 bit - you're gonna get a massive headache getting all those gems you need to install. Also if you're considering doing anything to do with image processing, consider NOT using Mac. Installing stuff like PIL and ImageMagick can be hell

Using MacPorts to install ImageMagick was hell. But when I used HomeBrew, it was like night and day.

I am using Lion and had zero problems with gems.

Try Wubi (http://www.ubuntu.com/download/ubuntu/windows-installer). Then you can simply choose between Ubunutu (for Rails development) or Windows (for everything else) during the boot up.

I'm going through the rails tutorial on arch linux and I haven't run into any issues. Definitely use ubuntu, I think it'd be pretty painful on windows.

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