Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to hold everybody's hand so you'll need to be resourceful and patient while you climb the learning curve, mostly by experimenting and teaching yourself. If you can afford it, you might want to consider attending a course that will teach you the basics on Linux, web development, Ruby, and Ruby on Rails.

Please understand that without a basic understanding of how all of this works you won't get very far regardless of how hard we try to explain it, and unfortunately we have many other things on our plate - such as developing new appliances, fixing bugs and adding new features.

Here's one last try to set you off in the right direction: in a nutshell, our software appliances are pre-packaged, pre-integrated, pre-configured, ready-to-use servers that we build to serve specific purposes such as, for example, hosting Ruby on Rails applications.

In other words, if you install Ubuntu server into a real or virtual machine, you get a server that is starts out as a blank slate - it doesn't yet do anything, and to get it to do something useful you'll need to install packages, tweak configuration files, etc. By contrast, when you install a TurnKey appliance you'll get an Ubuntu server that we've already setup to be capable of doing something useful (e.g., host a Rails application). For most people, this is useful because it can save them a few hours of work setting things up themselves. However if you don't already know what to do with a server that can host Rails applications it probably won't be useful to you. Sorry.

Linux-based servers don't usually have or need desktop GUI (Graphical User Inteface) components, which is why you will never reach the "rails" application you seem to be looking for. Perhaps you are expecting an integrated development environment such as Visual Studio. Stop - you won't find it. You're supposed to use our appliances as a server back-end, not as a development front-end.

Building a Ruby on Rails development studio might not be a bad idea in itself, but thats not what TurnKey Ruby on Rails is currently for. If we do that in the future, I'll send you an email (seriously).

Before that happens, a time may come when you might want to setup a Linux server that will host a rails applications that you or someone else has developed. At that point TurnKey Ruby on Rails might be useful to you.

Finally, next time, I recommend that if you just want to experiment with setting up a Linux server, you do it in a virtual machine so you won't have to dual boot and won't mess up your hard-drive partitions. Unfortunately, I don't have step-by-step instructions for fixing that.