As part of the LearningRails morph from a plain podcast to an online course, we are transitioning over the next couple of weeks from audio only to screencasts and other supplemental materials. This week’s release of lesson 8 is all about setting up a new development machine so you can follow along with the course.

We wanted to have a set of instructions for the common OS platforms that we could tweak from time to time as needed for the online course and the in-person seminar. In February, we shared with our students a very basic outline and then pointers to some of the better blog posts and articles out there. Unfortunately, we learned that little things change with various OS patches and software releases, typically faster than these external articles are reviewed (if at all).

Long story short, we just published four articles, one each for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Windows XP, and Windows Vista.

After scratching out and running through these articles multiple times trying to get the bugs out, I’m dreaming about installers now. Please take a look and pass on any suggestions or problems you might have when trying these out.

We’ve enabled comments on article pages now, so if you have a good tip to share (or a bug), please add it to the appropriate page. You can find the current comment entry pod on the right side of the article, near the top (better UI is coming!).

-Chris