Install Mongrel & Hpricot Under Ubuntu

Matt Henry — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:09:23 +0000

Whenever I do a fresh install of Ubuntu, and I’m setting up Ruby, Rails, I always run into the same problem with a handful of gems (such as Mongrel & Hpricot). This is how things usually go down:

matt@thinkpad:~$ sudo gem install hpricot
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing hpricot:
ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install hpricot
extconf.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
from extconf.rb:1
Gem files will remain installed in
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6 for inspection.
Results logged to
/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/hpricot-0.6/ext/hpricot_scan/gem_make.out

Now what? The main problem here is that Hpricot and Mongrel both contain some C code that needs to be compiled. In order to fix this, you’ll need to install the Ruby & C development libraries for Ubuntu. To do that, just fire up Terminal and enter:

sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev linux-libc-dev libc6-dev

You should now be able to install Hpricot, Mongrel, or any other gem that requires you to build some C. It’s that easy!

KDE4: meh

Matt Henry — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 17:06:25 +0000

I gave KDE4 a brief spin over the last couple of days, and I’ve got to say that I pretty much hated it. I think Ubuntu Tutorials hit it right on the nose, so I won’t go into any real detail of what sucked so bad. Suffice it to say that the two main things (for me) that made it so awful were the following:

They basically took everything useful out of the K menu, so it’s not clear at all how to even do anything. If it’s so confusing for someone who’s previously used KDE at some length, I shudder to think how a novice user would fare.
It looks so much like Aero. So much.

So, whatever. I kind of hated it. However, I’m a semi-devout GNOME/Aqua user, and I’ve got my desktop tweaked so I can wring every last drop of screaming productivity out of it. Maybe try the new KDE for yourself. YMMV.

If you do want to get it going on your system, and you’re running Ubuntu (or prolly any Debian-based distro), you can use this tutorial.

greenideas » linux

Install Mongrel & Hpricot Under Ubuntu

KDE4: meh