Been installing RVM on anything that runs *nix lately, ran into some issues with using this great tool on Ubuntu 10.10. After a bit of reading I discovered a couple of solutions, either I could build and install some of these libraries using RVM, or I could locate and install the dev versions of these libraries in Ubuntu. As I like my libraries updated for security issues and such like I took the later option.

So after sniffing out all the dependencies I pulled together a brief run down on how to get ruby, ruby gems and some other commonly used gems built and running on this version of Ubuntu.

Install the development suite for Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Install the Git version control package and curl http client utility

sudo apt-get install git-core
sudo apt-get install curl

Install the Git version control package and curl http client utility

Install the development packages which ruby and it’s utilities depend on.

sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev

Install the packages required to build nokogiri, which is an xml library used by various gems including RSpec

sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev

Install the command line SQLLite and development package.

sudo apt-get install sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev

Install Mysql client and development package.

sudo apt-get install mysql-client libmysqlclient-dev

Optionally install MySQL Server.

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Run the following command to install RVM

bash < <( curl http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/releases/rvm-install-head )

Append the following two lines to end your .bashrc file.

# This loads RVM into a shell session.
[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"

Source the .bashrc to make put the RVM command(s) in your path.

source .bashrc

Install ruby 1.9.2, this compiles the runtime and then installs it.

rvm install 1.9.2

Enable the ruby 1.9.2 runtime as the default.

rvm use 1.9.2 --default

List your default gems

gem list

Install a few handy gems

gem install rails nokogiri sqlite3-ruby mysql rspec

This should give you the basic environment required to build a very basic rails application and tests of course as we all love tests!