# Rubygems update breaks other gems?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubygems-update-breaks-other-gems/185849>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [March 27, 2010, 10:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubygems-update-breaks-other-gems/185849 "2010-03-27T10:00:53Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![kgthegreat](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/a88e57/32.png) [@kgthegreat](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/kgthegreat)\
**Post date:** [March 27, 2010, 10:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubygems-update-breaks-other-gems/185849/1 "2010-03-27T10:00:53Z")

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Hello,

I am on Ubuntu 9.10  
I ran the following commands for a rubygems update from 1.3.5 to 1.3.6

$ sudo gem install update\_rubygems  
$ cd /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin  
$ sudo ./update\_rubygems  
$ gem -v  
1.3.6

but after this some of the installed gems fail to work . For eg.

$ rails -v  
/usr/local/lib/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:777:in  
`report_activate_error': Could not find RubyGem rails (>= 0) (Gem::LoadError) from /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:211:in`activate’  
from /usr/local/lib/site\_ruby/1.8/rubygems.rb:1056:in `gem’  
from /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/rails:18

What is wrong here?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![kgthegreat](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/k/a88e57/32.png) [@kgthegreat](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/kgthegreat)\
**Post date:** [April 1, 2010, 5:15am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/rubygems-update-breaks-other-gems/185849/2 "2010-04-01T05:15:26Z")

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On Mar 27, 2010, at 02:00, kgthegreat wrote:  
Hello,

> I am on Ubuntu 9.10  
> I ran the following commands for a rubygems update from 1.3.5 to 1.3.6
> 
> $ sudo gem install update\_rubygems  
> $ cd /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin  
> $ sudo ./update\_rubygems  
> $ gem -v  
> 1.3.6

Had you run `gem update --system` it would have said something like  
“don’t do that” because you (probably) have debian/ubuntu RubyGems  
installed.

> What is wrong here?  
> ubuntu/debian RubyGems and standard RubyGems disagree with each other.  
> Now that you’ve installed standard RubyGems you’ll need to set the  
> GEM\_HOME environment variable to /var/lib/gems/1.8, I think