I'm interested to play around with RoR a bit. Apart from literature i should read, i'm particularly interested about how to setup development environment.
Here's a good example how to setup environment for Java from Noda Time project wiki pages.
I want something similar but for RoR.
As far as i know - unix operation systems fits way much better (have toyed on windows 1 1/2 year ago - pure nightmare). So it would be nice to get some recommendations about linux distros and how to make it run next to win7/xp.
Basically - i want to shorten endless searching and improvisation until i can play with some code.
P.s. bonus for simple sample project. :)
The single quickest way to get up and running might be to simply grab Netbeans and develop against its built-in JRuby instance. It will walk you through setting up a Rails project and even give you some nice-to-haves like autocompletion.
Baring that, the easiest method is likely to download a Linux VM Appliance pre-Customized for Rails Development and a copy of VMWare Player.