Wow – busy few days. I built three small distributions of Ruby on Rails 1.2.6 for use in my course. There is support for Windows and Mac OS/X 10.4.
The basic idea is to come up with a distribution that works from a USB drive for students working in a lab as well as a really simple distribution that does not mess with your system configuration and it can be put anywhere in a directory structure including on a shared file server.
Then I built printed documentation for each of them and a podcast for each version to walk my students through the installation process.
This whole thing is available at:
www.rubylearn.com
Have fun.