Are there ruby or rails user groups/meetups around you? If not, there's a bunch of mentor groups, or reddit seems pretty supportive. Stackoverflow is pretty good but there aren't enought people answering questions for the volume they're getting
I've been going thru same thing, my MBP hard drive died, so i installed RVM, bundler, and rails 3.2 on a couple ubuntu 12.04 laptops while i'm waiting for my Snow leopard install DVD. The key insight is to write down every step if you have to back out. And read 2 or 3 blogs and see what they agree on before starting install. These are good for 12.04