My prior
failures at using my Mac to develop Rails apps left me with a
few options. After a realization that paving my Mac was in my
future, I shook the dice and decided to dual-boot OS X and Ubuntu
on the Mac.
It was easy and painless. Install OS X, then boot the Ubuntu
install CD, and it installs a dual-booter for you. Be warned that
some Mac mini
hardware doesn't work on Ubuntu. WiFi will likely never be
supported, because Broadcom won't write drivers and won't release
hardware specs. Bluetooth should work but seemingly doesn't. Sound
requires a one-off kernel (with flaky sound behavior and
performance) until 2.6.12 is released with module support for the
mini's sound system.
Nevertheless, this is exactly the development environment I was
after. Synaptic (GUI over apt-get) gave me everything I needed
except RubyGems and Rails, which was easy to add when all was said
and done. Getting an LUA development environment was a piece of
cake, since Rails + WEBrick is really exactly what you need.
To supplement the software, I picked up the PickAxe
book and MySql
Cookbook.
Ruby is a very impressive language. I'm going to have a hard
time going to work tomorrow morning and writing a bunch of C# code
after living in loosely-typed land all weekend. ;)
One thing that's missing is a good Ruby IDE for Ubuntu. I've
been using nano and emacs to edit the files, but that won't last
long.
Does anybody have any recommendations?