Really struggling with installation. Need help

Hi all!

I’m not a Linux nOOb, but i’m not an expert either. I’d love to start
developing in RoR, but i’m struggling to set it up on my hosing
environment.
I have SSH access to a bare CentOS Virtual Private Machine at my
hosting provider. With bare i mean no Apache, no MySQl, no compilers,
very little libraries, etc.
The perfect environment to start with, but also the most work to make
it working.

I’ve been installing things like glibc, glibc-common, etc. to make cpp
and gcc to work. Once this was working i managed to install Ruby and
RubyGems, then Rails.
Then i installed MySQL and tried to install Apache. Now i needed
mod_fastcgi and somehow link Ruby to Apache.

Some software i can install with RPM’s, some i have to compile. The
problem i’m having is that i’m struggling with dependencies, versions,
etc and i have no clue of what i’m doing and if what i’m doing i’m
doing right. I’ve read a zillion of Wikis and blogs, but really nobody
actually installs Ruby on a CentOS-based VPS…

Is there someone here that can help me getting things up and running?
I really want to get my fingers dirty. On RoR, that is. Not on all
this Linux stuff. On my Mac RoR took 10 minutes to install…

Thanks in advance,

Ton.