Rails Live CD is an effort spearheaded by Brian Ketelsen to provide up to date 'live CDs' providing an entire Rails development and deployment environment based on GNU/Linux as a single disc image or CD. He's just announced a new version of the CD, version 0.2.1, and it includes:
- Rails 1.1.6
- RadRails 0.7.1
- jEdit
- emacs
- Subversion
- MySQL 5 & MySQL Administrator
- SQLite
- PostgreSQL 8
- Firefox 1.5 with several web development extensions
- Gems : ZenTest, Rake, Rails, OpenID, Mogrel, Capistrano
- KDevelop, Kate
- TightVNC
Everything the majority of Rails developers would need from a Linux Rails development environment is provided, and even Ruby-only developers will find this a time saver.
The Rails Live CD is particularly useful if you have a virtual deployment environment, such as VMWare, Parallels, or Qemu, at your fingertips, as you have a second Rails development environment up and running in minutes, or separate your Ruby and Rails development from your main machine. It's also useful if you want to double check that your Windows-created Rails application will work okay in a Linux environment, or if you want to see if your MySQL-focused app will still work with SQLite and PostgreSQL, without having to install those tools on your local machine.