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Asus Eee + Ubuntu + Rails
On thursday I bought myself an Asus Eee 900 - a tiny and cheap Linux powered laptop that is currently selling out in stores here in Sweden. I got a lot of attention in the office with this laptop and within a day it seemed every programmer in the office had an Eee on their desk.
I installed Ubuntu Eee and this was a huge improvement over the Linux OS that Asus provides. I am ashamed to admit that I haven't used Linux on the desktop for a long time and I was totally blown away by how advanced, slick, and user friendly Ubuntu has gotten.
Obviously, my ultimate goal was to install Ruby on Rails. At first I wanted to install from source in order to get an exact version and patch level of Ruby, namely the one that is officially recommended on ruby-lang.org. However, when attempting this various libraries were missing. I found a FiveRuns article listing the packages I needed but after I had installed them I ran into an issue with the MD5 library. In the end I resorted to using the ruby-full package which gives you the old tried and tested Ruby 1.8.6 patch level 111 (without the recent security patches). Here, roughly, are the steps I went through to set up my Rails environment:
##################################### # RUBY ##################################### sudo apt-get install ruby-full which ruby ruby -v # => ruby 1.8.6 (2007-09-24 patchlevel 111) [i486-linux] ruby -ropenssl -rzlib -rreadline -e "puts :success" ##################################### # RUBYGEMS ##################################### # Get latest stable recommended release of RubyGems from rubygems.org wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38646/rubygems-1.2.0.tgz tar xzf rubygems-1.2.0.tgz cd rubygems-1.2.0/ sudo ruby setup.rb # Not sure if/why this step is necessary sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem which gem gem --version # => 1.2.0 ##################################### # MYSQL ##################################### sudo aptitude install mysql-server mysql-client libmysqlclient15-dev ##################################### # Some useful Gems ##################################### sudo gem install rails mongrel capistrano mysql
I haven't double checked those instructions for accuracy since I would have to re-install my OS to do that. If you find errors or have improvements, please let me know. Here is a sample of articles on the subject that you might want to check out if you want to dig deeper: