2008/09/23

Hands on Ruby on Windows - Part x

Last time I tried to use a non-standard Ruby build on my XP box with no luck. Gems broken etc. - the usual pains. So I decided to move back to Linux to be able to develop some Ruby / Merb / Sproutcore code and followed my muse, Aimee. It was fun and joy even with the usual zlib problems that happen on Debian all the time. I just can repeat the Ruby on Debian people chore:
- Make sure you have zlib1 and zlib1-dev debs on your box before boiling from source
- Every Ruby source package have /ext (source) libraries so you just have to go under /ext/zlib and do the usual
make && make install
procedure if RubyGems complained. Don't panic - really!

In parallel I tried the latest jRuby build on my office workstation - and yes, I succeed :) It is relatively fast and stable, non-native gems working out of the box; I was able to create a skeleton Rails and a Merb app without problems.

There is still hope folks!

3 comments:

szabi said...

It will sound like a rant, but Aimee's install method is a stock Linux install (the configure make make install chant), it would work everywhere, but is considered dirty everywhere (except on Slackware). I'm happy to see Ruby working though :)

Janos Hardi said...

Not rant at all! As you pointed out it just worked the usual way, no magic happened :) I think that is cool because that is what we expect from an operating system :)

szabi said...

You imply that this is how things should work, but if that was the case, Linux wouldn't have spawned the miriad of package managers: most people expect a way of installing software and another for uninstalling. What you did effectively nullifies the latter, but I do know that you are aware of this fact :)