Comments on: Installing Rails on CentOS 5

By: Hamish

Hamish — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 17:56:22 +0000

I’ve just had to debug some problems after using this guide to install ruby so that I can install gems for command line programs (the sup MUA). It turns out there are a couple of other packages that should be added to the yum install at the start – ncurses-devel and readline-devel. If you could add them to your guide that might save others some pain

Also, re-doing the sudo make install didn’t actually copy the new libraries ( ext/*/*.so ) – I had to do it by hand. I documented this on http://serverfault.com/questions/174301/compiled-ruby-fails-to-find-curses/174495#174495

Other than those details, thanks for the great guide.

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 18:04:02 +0000

The pthread flag is there because lots of things built for Ruby use pthreads. It does slow the interpreter down somewhat in 1.8.6, but that’s supposed to be fixed on the 1.8.7 branch.

The enable-shared flag just makes sure that the binary is built with support for dynamic library loading.

I’m not sure that both of these are actually required, but I’ve never seen a Ruby configure command that doesn’t use them.

By: Horace Ho

Horace Ho — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 04:47:31 +0000

Why “–enable-shared” and “–enable-pthread” are required?

Thanks for the great tutorial!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:37:32 +0000

Damn… it’s been so long now that I’m having a hard time remembering. Glad it worked for you though!

By: dg

dg — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 11:30:11 +0000

I had a problem with the ruby 1.8.5 default yum package as mysql gem requires >=1.8.6 ruby.

I was hopelessly wandering for solution. Your steps worked flawlessly like magic .

Thanks a lot. Just out of curiosity how did you manage to debug the zlib thing?

cheers
dg

By: John

John — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:48:08 +0000

I was about to give up installing rails on CentOS at slicehost. After 5 reloads using other suggested paths, your solution worked!

Many Thanks!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:46:53 +0000

LOL – I can’t believe I missed that. Thanks for the heads up! It’s fixed now.

By: Eric Berry

Eric Berry — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:36:35 +0000

No problem.

In the RubyGems setup code block, you have
cd rubygems-1.3.5.tgz
but should be
cd rubygems-1.3.5

There’s a similar typo in the Git install block
cd git-1.6.0.4.tar.gz
should be
cd git-1.6.0.4

Great job! This blog entry is awesome!

By: Trevor

Trevor — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 05:00:52 +0000

Hmmm… would you mind being a bit more specific? If there are typos, I’m glad to fix, but I’m not sure what you’re referring to.

By: Eric Berry

Eric Berry — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 19:41:07 +0000

Great job! It was EXTREMELY helpful. You have a few typos when going into folders, but other than that, perfect!