Upgrade to 1.8.4

Ruby
1

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

2

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