My team plans to hire a couple of part time contract programmers and interns soon and I would like to reduce the amount of setup time involved with getting each new intern's dev environment up and running.
Considerations:
They will be working on PC based laptops or desktops running windows with VMWare Server and Ubuntu or just Ubuntu. The compuers may or may not be have identical hardware.
Don't want to spend a ton of money, but enough should be spent to ensure they are not frustrated by slow computers, etc.
The environment includes Ruby on Rails, Git, Passenger, Capistrano, Memcachd.
Any suggestions are welcome. If there is a good way to do this using Apple mac mini's that is something we would consider too.
I'd recommend getting everyone on Ubuntu, and writing a setup script that runs the necessary apt-get install invocations (and possible WGET and dpkg commands) needed to result in the standard environment. Then you simply need to keep a copy of that script available on an internal website, and you can run it on your interns or contractors machines or you can have them run it themselves.
If using Windows, it's slightly harder to do, but you could probably write a BATCH script to install Python and run a Python script to do the remaining setup (I suggest doing that simply because trying to do anything that is in anyway sophisticated in BATCH is a good way to drive oneself insane).