Hi there

I'm (brand) new to Ruby, so treat my questions in that light. On trying 
to install Beast (web forum software on Rails) I am required to test 
that requiring fcgi, or fcgi.so returns true from within irb.

$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require fcgi.so
NameError: undefined local variable or method `fcgi' for main:Object
         from (irb):1

I guessed that there may be an issue with paths, so tried the full path 
to the lib.

irb(main):002:0> require /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fcgi-0.8.7/lib/fcgi.so
SyntaxError: compile error
(irb):2: unknown regexp options - lb
(irb):2: no .<digit> floating literal anymore; put 0 before dot
require /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fcgi-0.8.7/lib/fcgi.so
                                              ^
(irb):2: parse error, unexpected tINTEGER
require /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/fcgi-0.8.7/lib/fcgi.so
                                               ^
         from (irb):2
         from :0

The above has worked before (ie. using the full path), giving the output 
'true'.

I have two questions.

1) How do I configure things so that I don't have to specify the full 
path to a lib.
2) How do I resolve the above error? Should I be speaking to the 
ruby-fcgi guys?

OS slackware linux
ruby 1.8.5-p2
ruby fcgi 0.8.7
fcgi 2.4.0

Thanks
Dale