has anyone tried installing ruby & rubygems from source on Ubuntu (preferably Ubuntu 9)?

Question

The Ruby on Rails website recommends installing Ruby from source under Linux. I encountered a number of C library problems building ruby from source on a clean install of Ub

Answer 1

I don't see what your problem is. You say that require 'zlib' returns false. But that means that it did work! If there were an error, you would get a LoadError exception.

Answer 2

Here is what I did to install ruby, gems and rails on Ubuntu 11.04

• Install ruby from sources

• Install RubyGems from sources

• Install zlib:
  • sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
  • cd your-ruby-sources/ext/zlib
  • ruby extconf.rb
  • make
  • sudo make install
• Install readline:
  • sudo apt-get install libreadline5-dev
  • cd your-ruby-sources/ext/readline
  • ruby extconf.rb
  • make
  • sudo make install
• Install openssl:
  • sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
  • cd your-ruby-sources/ext/openssl
  • ruby extconf.rb
  • make
  • sudo make install

Answer 3

Did you install libzlib-ruby? Here's my typical Ubuntu initialization before installing Rubygems:

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get dist-upgrade
$ apt-get install build-essential -y
$ apt-get install rsync -y
$ apt-get install ruby ri rdoc irb ri1.8 ruby1.8-dev libzlib-ruby zlib1g libopenssl-ruby -y