Hi,

I am on Kanotix linux since the first distribution was released by Kano.
However I am tired of the "if it can go wrong it will go wrong on
Kanotix" pattern.

Please recommend a distribution that by your experience is best for ruby
on rails development and need no hour-long tweacks for even "simple"
tasks.

Thanks,
Jan Martin

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

Jan Martin wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am on Kanotix linux since the first distribution was released by Kano.
> However I am tired of the "if it can go wrong it will go wrong on
> Kanotix" pattern.
>
> Please recommend a distribution that by your experience is best for ruby
> on rails development and need no hour-long tweacks for even
"simple"
> tasks.
>
> Thanks,
> Jan Martin
>

You should find the thread "Poll: Which distro do you use for Rails/Ruby
development?", which started on 29th March, useful.

regards

   Justin

> I am on Kanotix linux since the first distribution was released by Kano.
> However I am tired of the "if it can go wrong it will go wrong on
> Kanotix" pattern.

yeah if YaST doesnt do something right on SuSE, good luck.. or if the
package you want isnt in debian/ubuntu, youre in LinuxFromScratch
territory..

> Please recommend a distribution that by your experience is best for ruby
> on rails development and need no hour-long tweacks for even
"simple"
> tasks.

ironically i'd say gentoo is the best here. since tweakers use it, the
default configuration is the most pain-free and working around. i think
tweakers also use arch-linux, although i havent tried that since it is
primarily binary-based and ix86 only last i looked..

its going to be a bit weird on any of them, in that you'll likely get a
hodge podge of stuff installed via gems, installed via the OS package
system, and installed via SVN/tarballs/etc. Gentoo mitigates this a bit
by using portage as a frontend which just calls gems for most things,
but with the added bonus of it being tracked alongside eveyrthing else
youve installed..it similarly integrates well with CPAN..

--
Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.

On Sat, Apr 01, 2006 at 02:06:54AM +0200, carmen wrote:
} > I am on Kanotix linux since the first distribution was released by Kano.
} > However I am tired of the "if it can go wrong it will go wrong on
} > Kanotix" pattern.
}
} yeah if YaST doesnt do something right on SuSE, good luck.. or if the
} package you want isnt in debian/ubuntu, youre in LinuxFromScratch
} territory..
[...]

I take issue with that. If you want a package that isn't among the
thousands available for Debian, you can generally download the tarball and
configure --prefix=/usr/local; make; make install

If it is a matter of version (e.g. the version you need is in unstable, but
you are using stable), you can almost always download the unstable source
package and build it with dpkg-buildpackage to generate an installable .deb
for your system.

I use Debian as my development and deployment platform for Ruby (both Rails
and otherwise, with the exception of a script that works on iPhoto albums
and, therefore, is most useful under MacOS X). I am running mostly testing
(etch) with a bit of unstable (sid). I had no trouble installing Ruby 1.8,
or the associated rdoc, ri, and irb. Installing the native PostgreSQL Ruby
library was an apt-get install, as was RMagick. Due to bugs in the gem
install, I had to fight with it a bit since I wanted it in /usr/local
instead of /usr, but I would have had a working gems installation if I had
done a normal install. (There is also work being done to wrap gems with
Debian packages, but I'm not sure how far it's gotten.) Once I had gems,
installing Rails was a snap.

All in all, it was very easy. On this list (and ruby-talk), in the last
several month I've seen messages asking for help in installing Ruby, Rails,
RMagick, etc. on Windows, MacOS X, SuSE, Fedora Core 4 (and maybe other
versions), and Redhat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I also remember people
needing help with installing Ruby 1.8.4 on K/Ubuntu and being told that
Dapper Drake would have it. I have not seen any messages seeking
installation help on Debian, and it isn't because it isn't used. (The same
can probably be said of Gentoo.)

Note that I have seen people needing help with Rails deployment on Debian.
I had great success with apache2 and mod_fcgid (both installed via
apt-get), and it only involved a little tweaking of dispatch.fcgi and my
apache2 configs.

--Greg