Comments on: Installing Ruby 1.8.6 on Debian Etch (stable)

By: Norman

Norman — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:52:09 +0000

Yeah, looks like they have updated the version to 1.8.7 since I wrote this. Rails versions less than 2.1 are *incompatible* with Ruby 1.8.7, so you really should stick with 1.8.6 unless you are using Rails 2.1 - and even if you are, 1.8.6 is probably a better choice.

At this point I would highly recommend installing the Phusion guys’ Ruby Enterprise Edition despite the terrible name. It’s basically 1.8.6 with the security patches applied in a sane way (sorry, article in Portuguese, Babelfish to the rescue!). When used with Passenger (mod_rails) it can consume up to 30% less RAM. I’m using it on a production site and am very happy with it.

They don’t have a Debian package, but I’m sure some enterprising soul can make one… perhaps me if and when I get the time!

By: ragaskar

ragaskar — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:40:10 +0000

This seems to install ruby 1.87, which is not recommended yet for Rails (well, from what I can tell: the Rails download page says “Ruby 1.8.7 still has some bugs to straighten out.”, which I assume is equivalent to “don’t use it yet”). Otherwise it worked ok for me, excepting a failed dependency on a new version of emacs.

Thanks for these instructions anyways — very interesting!

By: Eelco

Eelco — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 13:16:24 +0000

Getting rid of the old ruby was (for me) simply a matter of

apt-get remove libruby1.8

No need to ignore/force/purge anything.

By: Kabari

Kabari — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:41:13 +0000

this might help some of you hacing problems as well:

dpkg –purge –ignore-depends=libmysql-ruby1.8,libopenssl-ruby1.8 libruby1.8

If you get an error trying to get rid of the old ruby.

By: Norman

Norman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:23:35 +0000

That is odd, but it doesn’t seem beyond belief that the packages could conflict. I think I had not installed ruby at all yet when I did this, so I didn’t have the problems you did. I’ll make a note of it in the blog post.

By: Brian Adkins

Brian Adkins — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:19:26 +0000

For what it’s worth, here is the error log:

http://pastebin.ca/965639

That’s not the original error log though, but the one after mucking around a bit, and then restarting the steps from square one. Maybe there was just something strange about how libruby1.8 was originally installed on my system.

By: Brian Adkins

Brian Adkins — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 03:16:45 +0000

Phew. After much pain and suffering, I eventually purged the libruby1.8 package and that seemed to allow everything to proceed:

sudo dpkg –purge libruby1.8

Not sure why the install failed because of that, but everything seems to be working now. Thanks again for the article - it kept me from resorting to my old standby of:

./configure
make
make install

By: Norman

Norman — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:42:15 +0000

Sorry to hear that… it worked for me in January but it’s possible that the packages in unstable have been updated since then.

By: Brian Adkins

Brian Adkins — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:09:42 +0000

Thanks for the article, but your system and mine must be very different

The dpkg -i *.deb step failed decisively.

Someone on the #debian irc channel suggested aptitude -f install which resulted in this:

http://pastebin.ca/965596

Ruby is gone now - glad I didn’t try this on a production system

By: Philip Ratzsch

Philip Ratzsch — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 19:01:20 +0000

Thanks for this entry! I’ve been having some issues compiling Ruby 1.8.6 on Dapper and these steps took care of the problems. Thanks again, and great work!