Ruby installs quicker than Scoffield breaks out of prison. Less than half an hour, and Ruby with Rails is installed and running on my Powerbook. For the most part I used default options since I’m not sure about package choices and what not yet. That should come with time.

Installation Notes:
1) Start at the Ruby on Rails site. Download Ruby 1.8.4 as suggested.
2) Follow the Install directions in the README file. I had to run /configure twice, making both times, as I got a message at the end of the first make telling me my Tk and Ruby were not running compatible versions of pthreads and lockups could occur. I don’t anticipate using Tk, but you never know, so I re-ran configure as suggested by the message at the end of the make so I don’t run into problems later. I did uncomment some modules in the ext/Setup file before running make. I may not have needed to. More later.
3) Back to the RoR site, and its instructions for Gems and Rails. I ran all commands from the downloaded directory.
4) Create the path and start the server like the RoR site explains.

Process Notes:
1) Run install commands as su - including the ruby make install and the gems and rails commands.

Points for down the road:
1) I’ll likely find a nice location on my laptop for the SVN and CVS repositories so I can create a batch file to auto checkout files, compile, and install newer versions if either updates are needed, or I need to add in packages I didn’t know about. I’ll publish this batch file if I ever create it.
2) Look at plugins.
3) Create an alias for starting the server in the background.
4) Running like suggested pops logging to stdout - the terminal. Need to narrow down better logging mechanism.
5) Follow directions on the rails server’s site - create DB, etc

I’ve got my install, my next round of tasks, and my project. Next - design phase and some more setup.

Fun fact: It took me longer to write this post than it did to do everything described in it. Hot damn.

If I found out one thing at MindCamp this weekend, it was the sheer power and elegance of Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  The vast amount of functioanlity that is possible with such minimal coding absolutely blew my mind.

I’d been hearing about it peripherally for 6-9 months or so due to the whole Web 2.0 explosion. About 5 months ago I was at a PHP meetup which just happens to share its space with the Seattle Ruby Brigade.  One guy came over and many feathers were ruffled.  I was even more intrigued.  Since then I’d heard more and more about its power.  Now, this weekend, I saw some .rb source code for several projects and had to rub my jaw after picking it up off the ground.

So, what’s next?  Learning it of course!  I already have MySQL and Apache installed on my Powerbook (the new builds, custom buiilt - not the preinstalled ones).  I also have PHP built, but that doesn’t matter much for this learning exercise.

One of the first steps I go through when learning something new is lining up my resources.  In about 30 minutes, you’ll see today’s del.icio.us bookmarks of mine get posted to my blog by del.icio.us’ auto poster.  I have source code locations, download points, mailing lists, links, user groups, documentation, and more.

I’ll post up more entries as I go through the next steps of picking a project, designing it, coding it, etc. I’ll let you know what I like about Ruby, what is hard, what is easy.