Installing Rails on SLED

SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 SP 1 (or SLED), as installed on the ThinkPad R61, is based on SUSE Linux 10.1. This distro includes a somewhat old version of Ruby on Rails, a popular web development framework. I wanted to use the latest version of Rails, but before I could do that, I needed to build and install the latest stable versions of Ruby and Rubygems (Ruby’s package management system). This wasn’t too difficult, but there were a few non-obvious steps along the way. (All of the steps described here were performed while logged in as the root user.)

I first used the Software Management tool in Yast2 to delete the existing Ruby packages I’d previously installed. Then I downloaded the source for ruby 1.8.6 here. Before building it, I had to unset the RUBYOPT environment variable, which was set to “rubygems” by SUSE. Then I built the basic Ruby interpreter using these commands:

./configure
make
make install

This process didn’t build or install the tk extension, which I use in a couple of my Ruby scripts to build simple GUIs. To build that, I first needed to use the Software Management tool in yast2 to install the tcl-devel and tk-devel packages. Then I built and installed the tk extension using these commands:

cd ext/tk
ruby extconf.rb
make install
cd tkutil
ruby extconf.rb
make install

Then I downloaded the latest version (1.1.1) of Rubygems here, and installed it using this command:

ruby setup.rb

Finally, I was able to install the latest Rails using Rubygems:

gem install rails

This installed all of the packages that Rails depends on, such as ActiveRecord.