[Rails] Re: Best Linux distibution for ruby on rails developement?

Gregory Seidman
Sat, 01 Apr 2006 16:06:39 -0000

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