I recently noticed that the next release of Ubuntu Linux will be one nice Ruby on Rails platform. After their last update of Rails itself, which brought the version number up from 1.0 to 1.1.2, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS now has all the current Rails tech built in. There is no need to search the web for all the pieces and compile package after package until finding one that works. Here are the highlights:

• Rails 1.1.2
• Lighttpd 1.4.11
• MySQL 5.0.21 or 4.1.15
• Ruby 1.8.4
• Ruby-FCGI 0.8.6
• Ruby-MySQL 2.7

This means that after a 10 minute server install of Ubuntu, one can uncomment the universe repo in /etc/apt/sources.list and issue the following command to setup at capable and competent Rails server environment:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8 mysql-server rails lighttpd libmysql-ruby1.8 libfcgi-ruby1.8

Then copy your Rails app over and configure it in Lightty you’re off. Now to find a hosting company which supports Ubuntu…

Update: Rubygems can be useful, but it isn’t in the standard repos. Instead, I downloaded and compiled rubygems-0.9.0.tgz.

Update2: I removed the Ubuntu-supplied rails and instead used rails from rubygems.