As a follow-up to this thread, I would like to mention a new way to try Ruby on Rails called Heroku (http://heroku.com).

You can try Rails with NO desktop installation!

It will actually allow you to create, test, and run full-blown Rails apps using nothing but your web browser. It uses Amazon's Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2) to host your application. It's in Beta, but it is quite a concept.

Paul James