Kyle Schmitt
6/10/2009 3:52:00 PM
OK to start with, know that CentOS is a RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
clone. A very good one at that, we use it on many of the machines
where I work. Remember, any packages or tutorials or howtos for RHEL
will work for CentOS of the same version (RHEL4.7->CentOS4,.7).
<Off Topic>
As a linux sysadmin I'd actually advise against using Ubuntu, since it
hides almost everything from the user and the admin both. It treats
the users & sysadmins like mushrooms. Using it, you may never learn
how things work. If you want to learn how things work & get things
done at the same time, stick with CentOS (if you really want to dig
down into it and don't mind not getting things done right away, get
Slackware, ArchLinux or Crux).
</Off Topic>
Back to CentOS.
it does use yum for automated package management, but down at the very
bottom of it all, it uses RPM. You don't have to add new repositories
to YUM if you don't want to, you can just download and install the RPM
you want.
Unfortunately I can't find any ruby1.9 RPMs either.... so your best
bet is just building from source.
Don't worry about turning it into an RPM: you only need to do that if
you're going to be putting it on many machines!
Don't worry about upgrading it later: You're home-compiled version
will live in /usr/local/[bin|lib|share] which will make it easy to
blow away later if needed.
Building this from scratch will require a little patience. Mostly,
you'll be running the configure, waiting for it to error about some
header or another missing, installing the dev package, and repeating.
It'll be like this
bash$ ./configure --program-suffix=1.9
wait for the error to come up --
Check to see if you have what it's missing --
bash$ rpm -q -a|grep -i "library-name"
Chances are it'll be there, but the dev package will be missing --
Install the development package (which is just header files & the like) --
repeat until ./configure gives you no errors
Hope that helps a bit
--Kyle