This would be a cool way to get begginers up and running quickly. We could setup an appliance with an optimal linux/unix config and pre-install whatever would help people learn, right on the appliance.
All anyone would have to do is download it and run it, viola instant “Try Ruby on Rails”
Apple does not yet allow VMWare to support guest images with Mac OS X so that sucks. (Any VMware appliance will run on a Mac using VMware Fusion.) Maybe we could do one for VirtualPC as well?
We have built a virtual appliance and have submitted for Vmware Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge,
Rails Appliance
is a Ubuntu based distribution with lighttpd, mysql,ssh, svn, ruby, gems, rails,
CohesiveFT offers a free configurable virtual Rails Stack that you can download in VMWare, Parallels, and Xen formats or directly deploy it to Amazon EC2. Choose from a variety of rubygems, database servers, and deployment options including Mongrel and Passenger at the Elastic Server Rails Portal – free and no signup required for the first build.