Mike Clark

Want to start using Ruby and/or Rails, but the benevolent IT department has your computer locked down? Don't want to make an installation commitment on your personal machine before enjoying the fun? Working on a team that could benefit from a standard development environment?

Sneaking Ruby and Rails through the system (theirs or yours) just got easier. Brian Ketelsen (a Rails Studio alumni) released another version of RailsLiveCD. It has Ruby, Rails, MySQL and friends, a big helping of gems, and more on a bootable CD. You just need a computer that supports booting off a CD or virtualization software, and you're in business. And because the LiveCD supports saving your changes between sessions to an external device (local hard drive, USB thumb drive, disk image on fat partition), the actual OS installed on your machine is literally beneath you.

To be fair, I haven't had a chance to give this a spin yet using Parallels Desktop on my Mac. But I see this as being a great way for Rails Studio attendees to easily get everything installed on their laptops and work on those machines in a non-destructive way.

Brian's put a lot of free-time work into making this possible, and he enjoys giving back to the Rails community. The results are impressive: The last release drew well over 30K downloads from his server alone. So if the RailsLiveCD makes your world a little happier, consider dropping something in the tip jar to help him pay the hosting bills.