# Good Linux Distro for Rails 3?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [July 3, 2010, 12:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045 "2010-07-03T12:13:02Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 7\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2010, 12:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/1 "2010-07-03T12:13:02Z")

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This may be the wrong place for this question but i am not sure where to  
go.

What is a good linux distro to get started with rails 3? I have given up  
on  
ubuntu and any related distro since the version of gem isnt high enough  
for  
rails and its related packages. I cant seem to use Arch since they use  
ruby  
1.9.1. Is there a distro that has what i need in its package manager so  
that  
i can be up and running fairly quickly? I am not the best at getting all  
the  
packages running from scratch, so i rely on package managers but that  
seems  
to be a loosing battle as well. Any help or recommendations would be  
appreciated.

~Nick

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**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2010, 1:38pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/2 "2010-07-03T13:38:18Z")

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Then update your version of gem with gem update command.

I mean if ubuntu isn’t gonna work for you, then I doubt anything else  
will. I think ubuntu has the most up to date packages of any distro.

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2010, 1:43pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/3 "2010-07-03T13:43:55Z")

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But I very much dislike ubuntu for rails. I tried it before and  
everything just did not work out. Too many files were named weirdly and  
I just did not want to deal with renaming or symlinking.

I stuck with CentOS 5.5 (also works with Fedora 13) and compiled ruby  
1.9.2 from source (preview3, but the RC just came out) and then  
downloaded rubygems 1.3.7 and compiled that as well. I never got RVM to  
work with it though…

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**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2010, 3:53pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/4 "2010-07-03T15:53:43Z")

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Sounds too strange to me…

I think you could just ignore the built in package managers and  
download and install your gems, rvm and whatever else from github and  
the gem package manager. Forget about ubuntu or fedoras packages…

Victor

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2010, 4:05pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/5 "2010-07-03T16:05:11Z")

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Victor S. wrote:

> Sounds too strange to me…
> 
> I think you could just ignore the built in package managers and  
> download and install your gems, rvm and whatever else from github and  
> the gem package manager. Forget about ubuntu or fedoras packages…

Exactly. At least for Rails 2.x, Ubuntu works quite well. You can  
probably get away with installing Ruby through apt-get; then just  
download RubyGems yourself and use that to install gems. No problem.

> Victor

–Â  
Marnen Laibow-Koser  
[http://www.marnen.org](http://www.marnen.org)  
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid

Sent from my iPhone

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 4, 2010, 7:19am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/6 "2010-07-04T07:19:00Z")

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Ubuntu works well, but I would use rvm with rails - very good  
experience with me using it/

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/n/7ea924/32.png) [@nickh](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/nickh)\
**Post date:** [July 3, 2010, 8:13pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/good-linux-distro-for-rails-3/191045/7 "2010-07-03T20:13:36Z")

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I have started using he distro from [http://virtualrails.org/](http://virtualrails.org/), has  
everything ready to go.

Jason