Installing Ruby 1.8.6 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04)

Posted by max on October 04, 2007

Ubuntu seems to be the big distro these days. (Remember all of those other “it” distros? Slackware? The original Red Hat? Mandrake? I am vaguely tired of the trendiness of distros.)

Anyway, there is no package yet for Ruby 1.8.6 on Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04), which is unfortunate, since mongrel_cluster doesn’t work properly under Ruby 1.8.5.

The install steps I got at Urban Puddle (here) were nice, but Rails still wasn’t happy: I kept getting that awful `require’: no such file to load – rubygems (LoadError) error.

Here’s what I did to fix it. YMMV.

Building Ruby (from Urban Puddle):

tar xjvf ruby-1.8.6.tar.bz2
cd ruby-1.8.6
apt-get build-dep ruby1.8
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

Next, to fix it:

cd /usr/src/rubygems/rubygems-0.9.4
sudo ruby setup.rb

Et voilà :

max@somehost:~ $ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'rubygems'
=> true

I’m not quite sure why the Ruby source doesn’t ship with the rubygems source. Is it because rubygems is still a < 1.0 release?