Best Linux distibution for ruby on rails developement?

Rails
1

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

2

Jan Martin wrote:

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

3

Hi - can’t really answer your question, but one point to watch out for
is
that Rails 1.1 seems to prefer Ruby 1.8.4. Ubuntu, which I would
otherwise
recommend as an excellent distribution, currently has 1.8.3.

Having said that, I currently use Kubuntu and Mandrake 2005 (yep,
ancient I
know!) and both work fine with Rails 1.0

It’s been a while since I set up the environments, but I remember both
being
pretty painless, so long as you stick the the dictum that you should NOT
waste time trying to get Apache and Rails playing together nicely on
your
development box. Use Webrick or Lighttpd via the script/server script.

Robert

4

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…

5

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

6

On 3/31/06, Robert J. [email protected] wrote:

Hi - can’t really answer your question, but one point to watch out for is
that Rails 1.1 seems to prefer Ruby 1.8.4. Ubuntu, which I would
otherwise
recommend as an excellent distribution, currently has 1.8.3.

“Dapper Drake”, the newest version of Ubuntu (still in beta), does include
1.8.4, as well as lighttpd. More details here:
QATeam - Ubuntu Wiki

That said, I’m using OpenSuSE, and it works fine. Granted, this is for
development and not production. It uses 1.8.2, but I’ve not run into any
issues with 1.1. The only other thing I’ve run into is having t
recompile
the source rpm for lighttpd, but that took all of 5 minutes.