RubyGems

Gotcha: I was unable to install RubyGems on SUSE 10.1 using the method described above. It worked fine on SUSE 10.2. On 10.1, when I issued ruby setup.rb command, it gave me the following error: /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:21:in `require__': No such file to load -- zlib

Based on experience shared by others on Google, I copied the zlib module from another location to where Ruby was looking for it but got the same error. Somewhere, I read you need the development version zlib-devel-1.1.4-8.1 but then I was unsuccessful in installing that one as well (can't recall the specific error). Before I could  fix that problem, I moved to SUSE 10.2 where everything went smooth.

Rails

People say rails can be installed using gem install rails --include-dependencies command (notice two hiphens before include and one hiphen before dependencies). However, when I upgraded to SUSE linux 10.2, I chose to install Ruby and rails out of the box so I didn't have to use this method. I did have to upgrade Rails from version 1.1.6 to 1.2 though. This is because out of the box, SUSE linux 10.2 comes with Ruby v1.8.5 (latest at the time of this writing) and Rails v1.1.6 (not latest at the time of this writing). To upgrade, I used sudo gem update rails --include-dependencies command. That's it! You have the latest and greatest version of Rails.Test it using rails -v command, which should show Rails 1.2.2 or whatever the latest at the time.

I took the first step to familiarize myself with Ruby and Rails some time ago. In fact, I blogged about this once. As part of my efforts to gradually move to linux, I decided to continue Ruby and Rails development on my SUSE Linux 10.1 install. Obviously the first step was to install Ruby so today, I am sharing my experience installing Ruby. First of all, check if you already have Ruby installed. Just  type ruby -version on command prompt. If Ruby version is displayed, you already have Ruby, if not, install it.

Installation is easy, you can build from source:

• Go to http://www/ruby-lang.org and click on Downloads link
• Select the stable release in the Ruby Source Code section - as of this writing Ruby 1.8.5-p12, also available here, is stable
• Place the compressed file in user's home directory. You can go to your home directory using cd $HOME command
• Extract the compressed file e.g. tar xvfz ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz, this will create a directory ruby-1.8.5-p12
• Change to the directory ruby-1.8.5-p12 and issue ./configure command
• At this point, if you don't have gcc package or other C compiler, you will get an error similar to "No appropriate C compiler found in path." If this happens, you have to install gcc package first:
• click on this link 
• select Open with Zen installer
  
• supply root password when asked
• if there are any unresolved dependencies, your default rpm installer should recognize them and get them automatically
• if for some reason, gcc installation doesn't go smooth, fix the it first before proceeding
• Now, ./configure command in /home/<username>/ruby-1.8.5-p12 should work
• Issue make command to build
• Run make install as root to install Ruby
• Run make install-doc as root to install Ruby documentation
• Test installation using ruby -v command. This should display something like ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) [i686-linux]