If you are trying to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu 10.x you will receive ugly error messages and parallel installed versions of Rails are not activatable.

This article shows you what to do and how to be successfull with Ruby on Rails v3.0 on Debian and Ubuntu Linux distributions. The configuration steps applied will be available to all Ruby components installed in your system.

RubyGems

RubyGems is a package manager for Ruby software components. Ubuntu is a Debian-based Linux Distribution. Due to the fact, that Ruby Gems (software components) are maintained by the Debian package manager, there are some required features disabled within the RubyGems package.

The solution for this problem is to remove the prepackaged version of RubyGems from your System. Afterwards you have to install a current and stable release of RubyGems. Then we are ready to go!

Remove RubyGems

Remove the prepackaged Version of RubyGems, because it is an old and error-prone version!

# uninstall the Debian package of RubyGems
$ sudo apt-get remove rubygems
 

Download RubyGems

To get an up-to-date version of RubyGems you have to visit the project homepage and download a stable release of the package. The subsequent update of your local Ruby components will also update RubyGems to the most current and stable version.

# Visit the homepage of RubyGems and select a
# stable release package: http://www.rubygems.org
 
# download RubyGems, e.g. version 1.7.2
$ wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.7.2.tgz
 

Install RubyGems

Now we are ready to install the new release of RubyGems to your system. After you have finished this task successfully, you have to run an update process to update your locally installed Ruby components. This includes the latest version of RubyGems.

# extract the archive and install the package
$ tar xzf rubygems-1.7.2.tgz
$ cd rubygems-1.7.2/
$ sudo ruby setup.rb
$ sudo gem update --system
 

Install Ruby On Rails

When you did succeed to install an current version of RubyGems, then you are ready to install Ruby On Rails v3.0 to your local system. All required components are downloaded from the remote repository.

# install Ruby on Rails
$ sudo gem install rails
 

Now you are ready to start developing and to run applications based on Ruby on Rails 3.0.

Related resources:

• Homepage of RubyGems
• Homepage of Ruby