The next major Ruby release (2.0.0) is currently planned for February. A preliminary version (Ruby 2.0.0-preview1) has been made available by the Ruby development team in order to give developers a chance to test their projects with this version and see if they are "Ruby 2.0 ready". At BitNami, one of our goals is to simplify the testing of the latest versions of open source web applications and language runtimes. We are happy to announce that we have just released an updated BitNami Rubystack with Ruby 2.0.0. It is completly self-contained and it will not conflict with your current development environment. You can download it, give a try and safely remove it when you are done.
In the ruby-dev mailing list developers are encouraged to check the compatibility of their Ruby 1.9 programs with 2.0.0 and report if they run into problems:
We have taken considerable care in source-level compatibility with 1.9. We believe all "normal" programs will work without modification. So, please give it a try, and report if your program does not work.
Yusuke Endoh
If you are not familiar already with BitNami RubyStack, it is a free packaging offering that simplifies the development and deployment of Ruby on Rails applications. This version includes ready-to-run versions of Apache 2.2.23, MySQL 5.5.28, Ruby 2.0.0-preview1 and Rails 3.2.8. It also includes RVM 1.11.3.5, NGinx 1.3.4, Passenger 3.0.17, SQLite 3.7.10, Git 1.7.11.3 and all required dependencies. It can be deployed using all-in-one free native installers (for Linux and Mac OS X), virtual machines and Amazon Cloud Images.