From: Kyle Schmitt Date: 2009-06-11T00:52:06+09:00 Subject: Re: centos and ruby 1.9.1 - possible? OK to start with, know that CentOS is a RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) clone. A very good one at that, we use it on many of the machines where I work. Remember, any packages or tutorials or howtos for RHEL will work for CentOS of the same version (RHEL4.7->CentOS4,.7). As a linux sysadmin I'd actually advise against using Ubuntu, since it hides almost everything from the user and the admin both. It treats the users & sysadmins like mushrooms. Using it, you may never learn how things work. If you want to learn how things work & get things done at the same time, stick with CentOS (if you really want to dig down into it and don't mind not getting things done right away, get Slackware, ArchLinux or Crux). Back to CentOS. it does use yum for automated package management, but down at the very bottom of it all, it uses RPM. You don't have to add new repositories to YUM if you don't want to, you can just download and install the RPM you want. Unfortunately I can't find any ruby1.9 RPMs either.... so your best bet is just building from source. Don't worry about turning it into an RPM: you only need to do that if you're going to be putting it on many machines! Don't worry about upgrading it later: You're home-compiled version will live in /usr/local/[bin|lib|share] which will make it easy to blow away later if needed. Building this from scratch will require a little patience. Mostly, you'll be running the configure, waiting for it to error about some header or another missing, installing the dev package, and repeating. It'll be like this bash$ ./configure --program-suffix=1.9 wait for the error to come up -- Check to see if you have what it's missing -- bash$ rpm -q -a|grep -i "library-name" Chances are it'll be there, but the dev package will be missing -- Install the development package (which is just header files & the like) -- repeat until ./configure gives you no errors Hope that helps a bit --Kyle