There are a few different approaches to installing Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 10.4. This is the technique that I use, in my opinion it involves the least hassle.
Ubuntu has a managed ruby package that serves perfectly as the basis for a Ruby on Rails installation. Open a console and install it with the following command.
sudo apt-get install ruby-full build-essential
I’ve previously had issues with the rubygems Debian package and would normally advocate installing the package directly from RubyForge.
cd ~ mkdir gems cd gems wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/70696/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz tar -xf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz cd rubygems-1.3.7 sudo ruby setup.rb
The ruby setup script doesn’t automatically place a link to the gems application in your /usr/bin folder so add it now.
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
Update your ruby environment. If you’ve downloaded the latest version of rubygems, you’ll be told that everything is already up-to-date.
sudo gem update system gem -v
With your ruby environment ready, install rails.
sudo gem install rails
You’re finally at the point where you can create rails projects, just use the following command.
rails test_project
I prefer to use something a bit more friendly than vi as a development environment for Rails. Download and install the latest copy of Netbeans from netbeans.org.
wget http://download.netbeans.org/netbeans/6.9/final/bundles/netbeans-6.9-ml-linux.sh chmod +x netbeans-6.9-ml-linux.sh ./netbeans-6.9-ml-linux.sh
