Bitacoreando

I use Fink to manage my Mac Mini, a Panther box which is patiently waiting for some Leopard love

In the meantime, if you need a fairly recent install of Ruby (1.8.4 at time of writing) on a Panther box (PPC or Intel), here’s a quick list fo things to do, the Fink way:

• Fink can take care of absolutely everything you need, but sometimes you need to use it’s unstable repositories. The latest ruby is in it’s unstable repositories.

  From Fink’s FAQ:
  

  Q5.8: There’s this package in unstable that I want to install, but the fink command just says ‘no package found’. How can I install it?

  A: First make sure you understand what ‘unstable’ means. Packages in the unstable tree are not in stable for any number of reasons. It could be because there are known issues, validation errors, or just not enough people giving feedback that the package works for them. For that reason, Fink doesn’t search the unstable tree by default.

  If you do enable unstable, please remember to e-mail the maintainer if something works (or even if it doesn’t). Feedback from users like you is what we use to determine if something is ready for stable! To find out the maintainer of a package, run fink info packagename.

  To configure Fink to use unstable, edit /sw/etc/fink.conf, add unstable/main and unstable/crypto to the Trees: line, and then run fink selfupdate; fink index; fink scanpackages.

  Also note, if you don’t want to install any more from unstable than your specific packages and their dependencies, don’t use the update-all command until you turn the unstable tree back off.

• After editing the file be prepared to wait a long time, since the fink selfupdate, index and scanpackages commands will download and rebuild all sorts of stuff inside the fink install. Eventually all the compilation will stop, and then you can do the following incantations:

  sudo fink install ruby     

  and after that:

  sudo fink install rubygems-rb18   

• that’s it, now you have a fully working ruby install inside /sw. It compiled ruby, abd so, it automagically added the readline library, giving you a proper irb and should you want to go the Rails way, a working console also.

  Should you find a borken IRB: rename /usr/local/irb to /usr/local/irb-old

• ** NOTE ** the PATH is very important issue here. Please note I did not mention anything about removing the current OS X ruby install or anything of that sort. I found quite usefull to add the following line to the bottom of /etc/profile

  source /sw/bin/init.sh

  (which is a step that you should have done when installing fink, anyway)

Enjoy.