This past Saturday, I was determined to get Ruby on Rails
installed…in Linux. I could have gone the easy route and installed in
Windows, but I wanted…well I want to branch out from the standard
Windows world that I know.

It turned out to be a 12 hour exercise in frustration. All I can say
is, thank god for VMware. Without it, I would have lost my sanity.

I first started my little exercise with OpenSuse10. It’s a brand new
free version of Suse…and looking back with hindsight, I’ve come to
the conclusion that it might be too much on the bleeding edge.

Whenever I tried to compile Ruby, it would give me an error. Everytime
that I thought I was getting closer to the solution, it would blow up
in a different fashion. So I deleted the virtual disk (the virtual
equivalent of tearing your hard drive out of your machine and flinging
it off a 10 story balcony) so I tried one of the other Linux
distributions that I had downloaded; Kubuntu (the KDE version of
Ubuntu). I’ve used quite a few distributions of Linux over the years
(and have always come back to Windows), but this one has to be one of
the worst ever.

The install of Kubuntu was fairly easy. Too easy. Not only did it not
ask me for a root password, it didn’t ask me to create a user. I went
to create a directory on /var/tmp and naturally you have to use the
root account to do (sudo mkdir /var/tmp/carlos). When it asked for a
password I was flabbergasted. I didn’t give it one. I tried a null
password and the word password. When it didn’t take the second one, I
shut off the virtual machine and deleted the virtual disk. Time to
install another distribution. This time I tried Fedora Core 4.

I had to reinstall it twice because I’m such a newbie, but on the
second time I was able to download Ruby and Rails and succesfully
install them.

If I can recommend one thing for the Ruby and Ruby on Rails community,
it would be to make the install easier. If you think I’m out of my
mind, read this blog entry.
If that doesn’t make you frustrated with the install then nothing will.
His documentation is one of the reasons that I stuck through what I
did. I knew that there was a light at the end of the tunnel, even for a
Linux newbie like me.

I hope that your install goes better than mine, but here is what I did:

This is unrelated, but I thought that I would post it here. When you
install Suse10, Fedora Core 4, and any other OS into a virtual machine,
it’ll complain that the VMware tools are missing. Installing from the
RPM does nothing. You actually have to do this:

1. On the VMware window itself, click on VM and select Install
   VMware tools. This should automatically mount the DVD to
   /media/<name of device>. In my case, it was in my DVD burner so
   the entire path was /media/dvdrecorder.


2. I copy the tar.gz file to that temp directory (although I found
   out that the location of that temp directory might not be a good idea,
   but that’s a tale for another post). Using this command (at this point
   I’m su’d as root which is this command: su root) mv
   /home/carlos/Desktop /var/tmp/carlos/.


3. Then I unpack the files using tar -xzf  /var/tmp/carlos/<name of file>


4. And then finally I change into the newly unpacked directory cd
   /var/tmp/carlos/<name of new directory> and run a
   ./vmware-install.pl.


5. Answer all of the questions and then choose my resolution.
   Unfortunately, to take effect, you’ll have to reboot and that command
   is, well, reboot. Finally I can see virtual machine at 1024*768.

Installing Ruby:
Note: During both installs, I had su’d to root. Command is su root.

1. Download the latest verison of Ruby (at the time of this writing it’s 1.8.3).
   

2. Move the tar.gz file to the tmp directory or your could unpack it
   there. The command that I used was mv /home/carlos/Desktop/<name of
   file> /var/tmp/carlos/.
3. Unpack it: tar-xzf <name of file>.
4. Change into the newly created directory: cd /var/tmp/carlos/<newly created directory>.
5. Run this command: ./configure.
6. Run this command: make.
7. Run this command: make install.
8. If the gods have smiled upon you, then Ruby has been installed.

Installing Rails:

1. Download the latest version of Rubygems. At the time of this writing it’s 0.8.11.


2. Move the .tgz file to the tmp directory. The command is: mv. /home/carlos/Desktop/<name of file> /var/tmp/carlos/.


3. Unpack it: tar -xvf /var/tmp/carlos/<name of file>.


4. Change into the newly created directory and run the command ruby
   setup.rb. NOTE: This is where it would fail to install on OpenSuse10. I
   could never get past that point with that OS.


5. Run the command gem install rails —include-dependencies.


6. If the gods have smiled upon you, then Rails has been installed.

Have a beer, you earned it.