I'm sorry to hear you had trouble installing GitLab before. Installation should be a lot better now. We replaced resque with sidekick. Also there are pre installed images available from http://bitnami.com/stack/gitlab
Ah, sounds great. I think you should really advertise those packages more! To be honest the 5.0 installation guide still looks terribly long. No way i would go through that again. BUT now there are packages.. hopefully for 5.0 soon.