This weekend I have devoted my time for playing with the new and famous frameworks Django, Pylons, and Ruby On Rails.
Almost 80% of the weekend I spent on installing them, if you don't wanna spend time by installing these frameworks and want start playing with them immediately, you are welcome to use my already configured virtual machine for Virtualbox.

First of all you will need Virtualbox, then download image of my virtual machine:
Server 1
Server 2

Extract the archive and import the virtual appliance to Virtualbox


You might need to change the network setting in Virtualbox by selecting network adapter

that has access to internet so your virtual machine is able access to internet

Note, you will need make few network setting changes in order to access pre-configured apache virtual hosts www.django.dev, www.pylons.dev, www.ror.dev

Here are my settings:
I use my win7 based laptop for development while the guest machine is running on my PC with Virtualbox.

My router's IP: 192.168.0.1
My guest machine's with all these frameworks IP: 192.168.0.200

so first you will need to change following settings on guest machine according to your network:

1) Setup static IP

# nano /etc/network/interfaces

Edit following lines according to your local network settings

---  interface file ---
auto eth0
iface eth0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.200 # this ip for your guest machine
        netmask 255.255.255.0
        network 192.168.0.0
        broadcast 192.168.0.255
        gateway 192.168.0.1 # this IP of my router
-----------------------


2) Setup DNS servers

# nano /etc/resolv.conf 

--- resolv.conf file ---

nameserver 192.168.0.1 #my router's IP
nameserver 208.67.222.222 # OpenDNS server just for backup

------------------------

3) Configure apache, actually what you need it's just update IP to your one that you set in step 1:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/pylons.dev
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default
/etc/apache2/sites-available/django.dev
/etc/apache2/sites-available/ror.dev
/etc/apache2/ports.conf   (in NameVirtualHost directive)

4) Update /etc/hosts
   change 192.168.0.200 according to what you set in "address" of step 1
 

Then update /etc/hosts file on your host machine or like in my case on my win7 based laptop I had to add following line to c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\
just press win+r and type «notepad c:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts» and the following lines (don't forget to update IP with correct one)

  192.168.0.200 www.pylons.dev
  192.168.0.200 pylons.dev
  192.168.0.200 www.django.dev
  192.168.0.200 django.dev
  192.168.0.200 www.ror.dev
  192.168.0.200 ror.dev

Finally if everything went well you can see simple «hello-world» projects as shown bellow:






In addition, as a bonus, there are installed MySQL and PHP. You can see phpinfo page by pointing your browser by IP address in my case this is 192.168.0.200

Software versions:
Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS with Vbox guest drivers (root password: 12345)
Pylons 0.9.7 (mod_python)
Django 1.2 (mod_wsgi)
Ruby on Rails 2.3.6 (mod_rails)
MySQL 5.1.41 (root password: 12345)
PHP 5.3.2 (mod_php)