2007
12.14

Rails 2.0 onto Ubuntu 6.06 LTS (Dapper Drake)

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My server machines run Drake server edition because of the 5 years of support (not a fan of upgrading all the servers every 6 months – the machines used to run Debian stable), which as you can tell comes with (ancient) rails 1.1.2 and nothing of rubygems (the vim version is even 6.4, although you can get vim 7.0 via the dapper backports).  I wanted to start playing around with rails, so I installed it and made a simple enough app. 

However, after reading about some of the new things in 2.0, I decided that I didn’t want to learn on 1.1.2 and then have to learn 2.0 differences, and might as well just start with 2.0.

Steps to get Rails 2.0 onto a Dapper Drake machine

  1. sudo apt-get remove rails

    • I don’t want apt/dpkg thinking I have rails installed and causing problems during any updates/upgrades in the future.
    • Obviously not an issue if you don’t have rails installed already :)
  2. went to rubygems.org, clicked downloads which took me here, then downloaded rubygems-0.9.5.tgz
  3. Extracted (tar xvzf) the tgz into /tmp
  4. sudo ruby setup.rb
    • This actually failed to fully complete since the ri (Ruby Info) docs had a problem.
      • Installing rubygems-0.9.5 ri into /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/doc/rubygems-0.9.5/ri…
        File ‘.’ not readable
    • Failed the same way on the second attempt
    • However, the actual binaries installed fine, so I ignored that failure.  If I actually have some need for reading docs about gem, I’ll jfgi
  5. sudo gem install rails
    • A lot of existing docs will say you need to use -y or –install-dependencies, but that’s now (at least as of 0.9.5 :) the default so you don’t have to specify it.
      • INFO:  `gem install -y` is now default and will be removed
        INFO:  use –ignore-dependencies to install only the gems you list
    • This failed the first time with a 404
    • After a google search (and apparently the particular .gem file it will fail on varies a bit), a couple of places said to just try it again and sure enough, it worked fine the second time.  I’m guessing they have a problem with their web farm or mirrors or something.  Whatever.
      • Successfully installed rails-2.0.1

That’s it – rails 2.0 is installed, so it was time to kick the tires and try a rails 2.0 app.

  1. Rails 2.0 and following DHH’s build-a-blog screencast said: 2007.12.14 20:13

    [...] Now that I had gotten Rails 2.0 installed, it was time to make a Rails 2.0 app.  I decided to go back to the original screencasts (tons of more recent ones at railscasts) and see if I could follow DHH’s original “build a blog in 15 minutes” screencast.  There’s some things that don’t work any more, and more importantly, a good number of things that are significantly better/easier in 2.0 now.  Here’s a list based on following the video: [...]

  2. /etc/mysql/debian-log-rotate.conf: No such file or directory said: 2007.12.18 15:40

    [...] As part of starting some Rails development on my linux dev box, I installed mysql-server which was up and running fine.  However, once a day I was getting an email from cron about a failure: [...]

  3. Jeff said: 2007.12.18 18:17

    I did the above verbatim on the latest version of ubuntu and it tells me afterwards, rails is not installed. to install, apt-get install rails but i don’t want to use 1.2.4…. what gives? :-)

    -Jeff