Installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu part 1

Yikes how unobvious is it to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu. No installer, no help and lots of wrong turns. I spent a couple of hours and still haven´t got it working. At 12:20pm I gave up and went to bed.

I found a link here to kick me off

When I ran the line
./configure –prefix=$HOME

I kept getting a message that I couldn´t compile executables. I need to install the compile and link libraries usingsudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install build-essential

This did the job. I then re-ran ./configure and i was moving again

make make install builds ruby from the source.

Time to get Ruby Gems

sudo wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/17190/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
tar -xvzf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.2
sudo ruby setup.rb

Now I get the error:-

/home/craig/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/remote_fetcher.rb:4:in `require’: no such file to load — zlib (LoadError)
from /home/craig/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/remote_fetcher.rb:4
from /home/craig/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/source_index.rb:8:in `require’
from /home/craig/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/source_index.rb:8
from /home/craig/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:501:in `require’
from /home/craig/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:501
from /home/craig/tmp/rubygems-0.9.2/./post-install.rb:81:in `require’
from /home/craig/tmp/rubygems-0.9.2/./post-install.rb:81:in `install_sources’
from /home/craig/tmp/rubygems-0.9.2/./post-install.rb:116:in `try_run_hook’
from setup.rb:584:in `run_hook’
from setup.rb:1322:in `exec_task_traverse’
from setup.rb:1175:in `exec_install’
from setup.rb:894:in `exec_install’
from setup.rb:712:in `invoke’
from setup.rb:681:in `invoke’
from setup.rb:1359

This chappie had the same problem on a different flavour of Linux. I gave up at this point and found another link. Let see how this goes…

For fucks sake…i get the same error. I know it doesn help that I don´t know a thing about Linux. But surely it shouldn be this hard. There´s an installer for Windows and Mac OS. WTF!. I off to bed to come back tomorrow.