I don't wish to open a can of worms here. I'm not even a Debian
user, I'm just trying to help a friend.

Please refrain if you can from digressing into discussions of politics,
licenses, package management, rubygems replacements, or "my distro can
beat up your distro."

I met with a friend at breakfast this morning. Coffee shop with killer
pastries and wi-fi, ahhhh.

He's a Debian guy. Our purpose in meeting was to install Ruby and rubygems
and one other library and then play with it a little. (He doesn't know
Ruby yet.)

He tried an apt-get before I got there. After fiddling a bit, I suggested
installing from source -- rubygems was complaining about zlib.

We installed from source, got no zlib, thus rubygems crashed. Tried an
apt-get of zlib-ruby, but no joy. Version conflict or something.

Gave up, moved to a different server, did everything the "right" way.
Wasted over an hour. Never got ruby/zlib/rubygems all installed properly
on either box.

Moved to a Red Hat server where it all "just worked."

What's the magic to get this going on Debian?


Thanks,
Hal