* Chad Fowler <chadfowler / gmail.com> [2004-10-14 01:17:07 +0900]:

> It's part of the rubygems installer.  So, it should be in the
> directory where you untarred the rubygems distribution.

That was the problem. It was owned by root.
So, geneology was this:

1) Tried to install gems into /usr/local/ with su
2) #1 failed
3) Built and installed local version of ruby w/o root.
4) installed gems (failed)

So, if I had sudo and had used 'sudo ruby install.rb' to install
gems, would the permissions for source not been root?

This explains why #3 failed, but not #1.

-- 
Jim Freeze