Ruby-odbc installation problem

Ruby 1.8.4
ruby-odbc 0.997

I setup ruby-odbc using:

rubyextconf.rb
make
make install

I then installed the Ruby DBD ODBC package into site_ruby.

I have successfully installed freetds and unixODBC into /usr/local/*

Do I have to tell the ruby-odbc extconf.rb process to look in
/usr/local/
for these libraries?

I seem to able to force things to work by setting LD_LIBRARY_PATH
appropriately, but is there a way to “bake in” the correct references to
the /usr/local stuff?

Thanks,
Wes