First I have to say, getting Ruby on Rails to work on Ubunutu Linux has been a pretty hellish experience. Well, getting Ruby on Rails to work on anything has been a pretty hellish experience. But now, I have conquered the beast and can more or less follow along in the Ruby on Rails Agile programming book. Woot!

To prevent some other poor programmer from having the same fun experience I thought I would share what I have learned. The steps below are for installing Ruby, Rails, and SQLite3. I am planning to use SQLite three because of the simplicity and freedom it provides compared to other database products.

Do all the following commands using sudo or as root. I just use sudo bash and execute them consecutively.

Install Ruby

First, Ruby is not installed on Ubuntu by default. So here are the steps to get everything. You need the dev package and rdoc to have everything in place for rails.

• apt-get install ruby1.8
• apt-get install ruby1.8-dev
• apt-get install rdoc1.8

Install Ruby Gems

The dev package from above is required to install gems. Otherwise you will be missing some header files. To install gems:

• Download RubyGems from the gems website
• cd to where you have unzipped the gem source files. (Remember you must be root or use sudo for this step.)
• Install gems: ruby setup.rb

Install sqlite3

Install all the sqlite3 debian packages.

• apt-get install libsqlite3-0
• apt-get instal libsqlite3-dev
• apt-get install sqlite3

Install sqlite3-ruby

Install the ruby sqlite debian packages.

• apt-get install swig
• apt-get install libsqlite3-ruby

Install Rails

Now that all the packages are in place, you can install rails using Ruby gems.

gem install rails

That should do the trick. Enjoy.