[ruby-talk:20820] Ruby/Tk core dump

I asked someone at uni to install Ruby for me, so I could use it for an 
assignment that required some Tk work (everyone else usedPython).

While it appears that the basic install of 1.6.4 worked fine (ie, other 
programs seem to run fine), when I try to run even the most trivial Tk 
code, Ruby dumps a core, which looks like it's intentional (ie, that tk.rb 
has worked out something went wrong and has requested the interpreter to 
die, for debugging purposes).

Here's what gets printed when it dumps the core ...

   /usr/other/csus/pub/lib/ruby/1.6/tk.rb:470: [BUG] Bus Error
   ruby 1.6.4 (2001-06-04) [sparc-solaris2.6]
   Abort (core dumped)

.... and here's a stack traceback from gdb when looking at the core

   #0  0xdf748244 in _libc_kill () from /usr/lib/libc.so.1
   #1  0xdf6fa608 in abort () from /usr/lib/libc.so.1
   #2  0x310c4 in rb_check_type (x=769552, t=43) at error.c:178

Any idea what's wrong or do you need more info.  From tk.rb, line 470 seems 
to be where it attempts to talk to the Tk library (looks like it's running 
some Tcl code, maybe?).  It's a rather complex line that says ... 

   INTERP._invoke("proc", "rb_out", "args", "if {[set st [catch {ruby   
[format \"TkCore.callback %%Q!%s!\" $args]} ret]] != 0} {if {[regsub -all 
{!} $args {\\!} newargs] == 0} {return -code $st $ret} {if {[set st [catch 
{ruby [format \"TkCore.callback %%Q!%s!\" $newargs]} ret]] != 0} {return 
-code $st $ret} {return $ret}}} {return $ret}")

Any suggestions would be most welcome, because I'd love the department to 
accept Ruby generally (I have a forward thinking tutor, who let me use 
Ruby, even though we were supposed to be using Python, but I don't know 
that everyone would be so open).

By the way, I've demo-ed my program on a laptop, so I'm not in urgent need 
of sorting this out; it would just be nice to get everything installed 
properly on the departmental machines.

Thanks in advance.