From: mathew Date: 2005-12-22T07:42:48+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby and Debian Hal Fulton wrote: > He's a Debian guy. Our purpose in meeting was to install Ruby and rubygems > and one other library and then play with it a little. (He doesn't know > Ruby yet.) > > He tried an apt-get before I got there. After fiddling a bit, I suggested > installing from source -- rubygems was complaining about zlib. Probably not such a good idea, because then you lose dependency handling. > We installed from source, got no zlib, thus rubygems crashed. Sounds like a bug in Ruby. The ./configure ought to test for the presence of zlib. I'd report the bug. > Gave up, moved to a different server, did everything the "right" way. > Wasted over an hour. Never got ruby/zlib/rubygems all installed properly > on either box. Well, I've got a vanilla debian-stable server hanging around that I've never done any Ruby work on, so I've just tried the obvious 'right' way of doing everything, and it all worked first time: # apt-get install ruby Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done The following extra packages will be installed: libruby1.8 ruby1.8 Suggested packages: ruby1.8-examples rdoc1.8 ri1.8 The following NEW packages will be installed: libruby1.8 ruby ruby1.8 0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded. Need to get 1500kB/1519kB of archives. After unpacking 5837kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue [Y/n]? Y [Stuff scrolls past] # wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/5207/rubygems-0.8.11.tgz # tar -xzf rubygems-0.8.11.tgz # cd rubygems-0.8.11 # ruby setup.rb [Stuff scrolls past] # gem install vim-ruby [Stuff scrolls past] Successfully installed vim-ruby-2005.10.07 # I note also that ruby correctly has zlib as a dependency in Debian stable. So apt-get install ruby should have installed zlib even if it was missing. So I'm guessing your friend's debian box is b0rked in some major way. mathew -- My parents went to the lost kingdom of Hyrule and all I got was this lousy triforce.