Does anyone know of a site that has rpms of a reasonable (at least
1.8) ruby for a variety of older linux distros?

I was getting ready to test some scripts on my servers, and have been
having problems getting modern enough ruby binaries for older installs
like Red Hat Enterprise 2.1 AS.

Given the nature of these servers it's not reasonable to upgrade them
to a more modern OS, and these servers do not have the development
packages on them (I found that out after attempting to build ruby on
one such server where I could spare the cycles).

Failing finding modern ruby rpms for older distributions, can a truly
static build of ruby work?  Adding --disable-shared --enable-static to
./configure doesn't seem to work (and yes, that's on a modern box :).

Thanks all.
--Kyle