If you can live without the edge Ruby / Rails stuff, I’d recommend you to use Enterprise Ruby. Less memory consumption. Easy to install. Stable.
To install it, just get the newest tarball (at the time of writing this, its this). Unpack it and run the installer. The installer will check if you have all the required libraries, if you don’t, just install them, it shoudln’t be more than three.
Usually, the defaults are just fine, if you leave them, it will install ruby in /opt/ruby-enterprise-xxx. When your done, you should symlink the following:
sudo cd /opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.7-2009.10/bin sudo ln ./ruby /usr/local/bin/ruby sudo ln ./rails /usr/local/bin/rails sudo ln ./rake /usr/local/bin/rake sudo ln ./gem /usr/local/bin/gem
If you want passenger, you could run the passenger nginx/apache installer, a really nice way to deploy rails apps.
You’re done. Just one thing to remember, if you install gems that create an executeable like capistrano, javan-whenever, cucumber etc, you should symlink them as well, otherwise you’ll have to call them from /opt/ruby-enterprise-xxx/bin
One more nice thing, if you installed postgresql and libpq-dev it will automatically install the pg-gem. This works with mysql and sqlite as well.
