Every Flavour Beans

Installing Ruby on Gentoo:

To install Ruby on Gentoo, run the following command(as root) in a shell:

You can add a few ‘USE’ keywords if you want to install additional Ruby support(like database integration, CGI support etc). Add the following line to the /etc/portage/package.use file(keywords that are already present in ‘USE’ flag of /etc/make.conf file need not be added):

dev-lang/ruby docs examples fastcgi mysql

‘ruby-mode’ adds the ruby mode to the Emacs editor while editing .rb files. Use ‘ruby-modes’ to add similar support to XEmacs. You need to add some text to .emacs file from your home directory; see this to know how to do it.

Installing Ruby on (K)Ubuntu:

Preparation:

A little note before you start installing Ruby on (K)Ubuntu:
There are two versions of Ruby available in the Ubuntu repositories:

• Ruby 1.8.4
• Ruby 1.9.0

1.8.4 version can be installed by appending 1.8(Eg. ruby1.8, irb1.8 etc) to the respective package names. Similarly, 1.9 version can be installed by appending 1.9(Eg. ruby1.9, irb1.9 etc) to the respective package names. If nothing is appended(Eg. ruby, irb etc), what debian considers as default version of ruby(currently 1.8.4) will be installed.

Once Ruby is installed, the command to invoke the Ruby interpreter would depend on which version of it is installed. Like, if ruby1.8 is installed, ruby can be invoked using ‘ruby’ or ‘ruby1.8′ commands(‘ruby’ will be a symbolic link to ‘ruby1.8′):

(the quotes in the third command are inverted quotes and not single quotes)

Use ‘ruby1.9′ if 1.9 version is installed.

If all this sounds confusing, just follow my recommended way of installing Ruby and skip the ‘Optional’ part.

My recommended way of installing Ruby on (K)Ubuntu:

To install Ruby on Ubuntu family of operating systems, type the following command in a shell:

(Or search and install these packages using Synaptic(on Ubuntu) or Adept(on Kubuntu) Package Manager.)

Running commands like ‘ruby’, ‘irb’ etc will invoke the latest stable versions:

Optional

To install the 1.9 version(which is not stable as of now), use the following command:

Of course you can also have both 1.8.4 and 1.9 versions installed on the system at the same time. Run the following command to do so:

In this case, use ‘ruby’ to execute the 1.8.4 version of the interpreter and use ‘ruby1.9′ to run the 1.9 version.

What about ruby-gems?

I don’t recommend installing additional Ruby packages using the ‘rubygems’ utility if you use a distribution specific package manager(apt, emerge etc) to manage the software on your system. Debain community strongly discourages its use to install the ruby packages(rightly so), as it doesn’t follow the package management conventions of Debian’s package manager(and hence can mess up with it and stop it from working properly). Same goes for Gentoo OS too. Go here to read more information on this. But if Ruby is (one of) the most important software for you, then ‘rubygems’ can make it very easy to install the latest versions of Ruby related software, long before they are added to the Debian or Gentoo repositories. In that case, follow the documentation on how to install ‘rubygems’ and how to install Ruby packages using it from this page.

In Gentoo, you can do this:

Installing Ruby on Fedora/SUSE/Mandriva etc:

Use RPMs! Hunt them down using google.com or rpmfind.net and then install them one by one in the order.
Or use the package manager of each distribution(‘yum’, ‘yast’ and ‘urpmi’ respectively) and hope for the best. I have tested with yum and yast and at least they did not create too many issues for me:

Ruby on Fedora using yum:

If the yum configuration files(fedora.repo etc) are properly setup, you can install Ruby using the following command:

Above command will install ruby, irb, ri, rdoc commands and Ruby mode for Emacs. You need to add the following line to ‘.emacs’ file present in your home directory(create it otherwise) to enable Ruby mode in Emacs editor:

(require ‘ruby-mode)

On SUSE, use YaST to install ‘ruby’, ‘ruby-doc-ri’ and ‘rubygems’ packages by searching for them from the YaST interface(YaST->Software Management->Search).

‘ruby’ and ‘rubygems’ are available on the SUSE 10.1 DVD itself; you can add repositories from the Internet to install the other Ruby packages(ruby-docs-ri etc), or use ‘rubygems’ to install them.
Add the following in the YaST configuration (YaST->Installation Source) if you want to install ‘ruby-docs-ri’ from the Internet:

Protocol: FTP
Server Name: ftp.mirrorservice.org
Directory on Server: /distribution/SL-10.0-OSS/inst-source/
Authentication: Anonymous