# Upgrade to 1.8.4

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrade-to-1-8-4/93365>\
**Category:** Ruby\
**Created:** [March 31, 2006, 6:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrade-to-1-8-4/93365 "2006-03-31T18:25:52Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![stuartbrand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/5f9b8f/32.png) [@stuartbrand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/stuartbrand)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2006, 6:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrade-to-1-8-4/93365/1 "2006-03-31T18:25:52Z")

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I’m running Ubuntu 5.10 and currently have ruby 1.8.2 installed. I would  
like to upgrade to 1.8.4 but there doesn’t seem to be an available deb  
package for 1.8.4. Can someone give me some pointers on upgrading using  
the source? I don’t want to have version collisions or have both  
versions installed.

Thanks

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![stuartbrand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/5f9b8f/32.png) [@stuartbrand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/stuartbrand)\
**Post date:** [March 31, 2006, 8:16pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/upgrade-to-1-8-4/93365/2 "2006-03-31T20:16:08Z")

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The big trick on Ubuntu is to make sure you have all the prerequisite  
development packages installed before building ruby (i.e. zlib,  
readline, etc). Without these you will get a version of ruby to build,  
but it will be missing important libraries (without which gems among  
many others will not work).

I had assumed this stuff would have been installed, but Ubuntu is  
geared toward “normal” desktop users and not developers so these very  
common development packages are not installed unless you go out and  
get them first. After that ruby builds find and 1.8.4 works like a  
champ. I uninstalled ruby (apt-get remove) before installing the newer  
build, you could also set the prefix if you do not want it in  
/usr/local.

Good luck  
pth