It only took me 3 hours to get Rails running on Ubuntu

I wish! I've used Ruby (the .NET version IronRuby at least) for building a project, and tinkered with Rails in a non-serious way, but I find myself wanting to test something real for work these days. Well, it's a long shot, but I'm wondering what the cost in man hours would be to move our public Subversion subversion from a Windows 2003 VM to Ubuntu. The reason? I like VisualSVN Server for its ease of use and no brainer installation, but I need to get a decent web GUI for svn up and running. There's the PHP-based WebSVN project that presumably I can plug in to svn, but I honestly don't want to mess with co-hosting the private Apache server that VisualSVN uses on port 80 with a full blown Apache install...also on port 80...just for the PHP stuff.

Maybe that really isn't too big of a deal, but I also find myself wanting to try out the truly beautiful and useful svn GUI that is Warehouse. It is a Ruby on Rails application, and that is the real impetus for trying Ubuntu and Apache: Rails is a bugger to get working correctly on Windows in anything other than play mode. I've tried mongrel packs (!), WebBrick (can't believe I actually did that), and other approaches and it just seems like I'm trying to force the Rails round peg into the Windows square hole. So on to Ubuntu. I've been using Sun's (Oracle's?) VirtualBox for a while now, ever since VMware completely hosed my laptop and external USB drive with all my backups. I really like it because it just works and has great bridged networking support. What with all the crazy eth0 and other intuitive network adapter names on Linux, that out-of-the-box networking experiences is truly a blessing. So without further ado, here's a screenshot of my desktop about 10 minutes ago. I'm pretty pleased with progress thus far, even if most of it was trolling through online "HOW-TOs" and the phenomenal TekPub Linux for Softies screencast series (totally worth $14).

I have to say, the apt-get package manager for Ubuntu is truly amazing. I was floored when I just typed sudo apt-get install apache2 and it just worked. Anyway, nothing useful to mention like how I actually got this far, but again, I'm pretty pleased with the end result: a scaffolded Rails app that actually serves up HTML. Woohoo!