Linux, Rails, Mono C#, No-SQL setup

Question

Hi I am keen on setting up a Linux box to play around with Rails, No-Sql, Mono C#... and opensource projects!

I am keen on learning Ruby on Rails and don't have a Mac so I think for now the cheapest option is to install a Linux distro on my computer. I am also keen on trying out MongoDB

I am a complete nube to Linux and am wondering if I should install openSuse, Ubuntu, Debian or ? I am also a C# developer so I can install Mono and MonoDevelop. They have packages for these http://monodevelop.com/Download

Anyone have some blog posts, screencasts, books, experience I would love to hear about it :)

Cheers Jake

Answer 1

It probably doesn't matter much which Linux you install on a desktop. The user experience will be determined by Gnome or KDE, not the distro.

The two aspects of linux that have the biggest user-experience impact are the desktop and the package system. Linux has, sadly, two of each.^1.

There are two desktops: Gnome and KDE. In general, you can choose Gnome or KDE with any distro and you can even install both. (You only run one at a time, though.) Please realize that except for some configuration details, for the most part the distros redistribute the same set of Unix-model software, so you aren't getting anything wildly different or even as different as XP vs Vista.

Either of the two main package systems can in some ways be used with any distro, but life will be much easier if you stay with the vanilla one for your distro. But since you aren't expecting either one I think it won't matter.

Now, if you went and installed, say, NetBSD, then you might notice some real differences, although you would still have your choice of Gnome or KDE.

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^{1. Technically, there are 10 or 20 window managers that provide interesting lightweight GUI's that are something a bit less than a full-blown desktop GUI, but that's in the advanced class. Also in that class: Unix servers generally run no GUI at all.}

Answer 2

I would go with Ubuntu or OpenSuse since most of the tutorials, community support and other stuff around Mono is targeted to these distributions.

Answer 3

Note: you can still learn Ruby on windows, you can also use Ruby and .NET with IronRuby which is nearly 100% compatible with C Ruby. That's not to stop you from learning linux though as it gives you a different perspective on OS's and will expose you to the power of the command line.

Mono on linux is very complete. The best distribution to use with it would be Open Suse (as it's supported and recommended by Novell who develop Mono).

If you want to go the NoSql route than I would recommend looking at redis a very fast and advanced key-value data store with support for rich data structures, i.e. lists, sets and ordered sets. If you use C#/Mono you can this redis client which has native support for storing complex types and exposes Redis server-side lists and sets as IList<T> and ICollection<T>'s.