Now Rails Hates Me

Previously, I have complained how Linux (and the Linux Gods) truly hated me and went out of its way to make my life miserable. Even repeated sacrifices of Windows and Apples didn’t help until, like a Miracle sent from Tux, I came across PCLinuxOS. This has been wonderful. It works with all my hardware and is really easy to use.

There is one small problem. Since I mentioned Toutatis in the last post, the Linux God Tux seems to have passed the message on to the Rails God to make my life hell once more.

PCLinuxOS is still brilliant. It works really well. It came with Ruby installed (version 1.8.5) and installing ruby gems (0.9.2) was a walk in the park. The problems started when I got all clever and issued:

gem install rails –include-dependencies

The first time, I got an error message saying it could not find rails in any repository, second time it seemed to run ok. Sadly, despite getting messages telling me rails-1.2.3 is properly installed, I can’t get it to run. I get various error messages, depending on what obscure task I am trying to do (eg. “rails demo” produces errors about not having the 1.2.3 version, and needing to edit environment.rb to reflect the actual version…).

This creates a bit of a quandry. I can download (in fact I already downloaded it) the Rails CD version of PCLinuxOS, but I like this installation. It is set up to my preferences. I have spent time tweaking it and installing firefox extensions (for example). The thought of re-installing just to get rails running is nauseating. However, one of the reasons I wanted Linux was to do Ruby / Rails development in a way which matched the deployment server.

Choices, choices… I think it is time for some more sacrifices… Maybe some coffee beans will do the trick for Ruby, no idea for Rails…

9 thoughts on “Now Rails Hates Me

  1. I feel I should point out, in the code example above it was actually – and – (as it should be) not the emdash which seems to be showing (–), that is just an oddity of the blog converting two dashes to an em dash.

  2. Rails hates everybody to begin with, don’t take it personally. On the flip side, once you’ve managed to wriggle her seductive charms into the proper place and showered her with the right gems, she’ll give you a load of wanton development pluses. The hussy.

  3. Strangely, I have just got Ruby / Rails up and running on windows XP in minutes few.

    Pretty sickening really.

  4. RadRails can get you up and running pretty quickly (as long as you can be bothered using an Eclipse-based app). I generally use Locomotive with TextMate on the Mac. It’s sweeeeeet. 😉

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