I have everything set up and working. I managed to run Diaspora on my local development (see screenshot above). All dependencies needed to get Diaspora running are quite similar with wheedly and etroduce (start up project I used to be part of).  

The following are the dependencies:

•    Build Tools  - packages needed to compile components below
•    Ruby  - the language (I personally use rvm, so that I can easily switch between multiple ruby versions.)
•    Mysql  - storage engine
•    ImageMagick  - image processing library
•    Git  - version control system
•    Redis  - key value store 
•    RubyGems  - a package manager to download gems
•    Bundler - gem management tool for ruby projects 

Bundler made it easy to install Diaspora's gem depencencies, simply by running:

      bundle install

There are more than 50 gems used in this project and I have no idea about some of them. It's going to be hard, but hey, no pain no gain.

That's all for today. Can't wait to see what's going on inside. It will probably take one month to get acquainted with the code. Maybe, I should print the source code and read it on my way to work. That's a brilliant idea. :D