Compiling Ruby on Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy) How-to
Published: 23 Jan 2007
Here’s a quick and dirty guide for compiling the latest recommended version of Ruby from source on Ubuntu 6.10:
Download ruby-1.8.5-p12.tar.gz and unzip the contents to a temporary directory I’ll call INSTALL_DIR.
Make sure you have what you need to compile: shsudo apt-get install build-essential
cd INSTALL_DIR
./make
./make test
sudo make install
now test the install:
ruby -v
should respond with…
ruby 1.8.5 (2006-12-25 patchlevel 12) [i686-linux]
That’s it!
Update (2007-01-29): I referred to this post to fix an issue I had with the irb console not working. I had to compile the readline library and recompile ruby. After that, everything worked as expected. I also tried installing to my home directory using the prefix option and never got it to work correctly. In the end, installing using the default paths (/usr/local) worked best.