I have a fairly new (read, reasonably “clean”) XP SP2 system that I’m
attempting to use as a Rails dev environment.
I’ve tried it two ways, 1) with InstantRails and 2) with the Rails
package and doing the install by hand. Both result in a weird set of
‘hangs’, so I suspect something fundamental is at work here.
Basically I can start Ruby apps, but they just seem to sit there and
do nothing. Windows Firewall is of course installed, but it is
disabled.
With the InstantRails route I can start the InstantRails manager
utility, and it starts Apache and MySQL. If I follow the instructions I
can connect to my applications (they supply two samples), but nothing
happens after the redirect. If I launch WEBrick from the InstantRails
manager WEBrick starts in a console window, but when I attempt to
connect to localhost:3000 I get no output. If I telnet to ‘localhost
3000’ and send ‘HEAD / HTTP/1.0\n\n’ I get nothing as well. Ruby is
executing (I see the process) but is waiting for something.
So I try downloading Ruby, installing it and Gem. Both install
cleanly. When I attempt ‘gem install rails’, I see this:
Attempting local installation of ‘rails’
Local gem file not found: rails*.gem
Attempting remote installation of ‘rails’
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
The ruby process sits and does nothing for a long time, and it ignores
Control-C signals. It seems to be connecting to something though:
ruby.exe:5640 TCP foo.mycompany.com:1505
unknown18.109.234.205.defenderhosting.com:http ESTABLISHED
Something on my system seems to be making Ruby sick in general. My
other laptop works just fine, so I know the sources I’m using are
working. I want to use Ruby on THIS machine though. 
Ideas?
-brian
–
Brian W. Spolarich ~ Manager, Information Services
Advanced Photonix / Picometrix ~ 734-864-5618
[email protected]