John Joyce
7/2/2007 11:04:00 PM
On Jul 2, 2007, at 5:27 PM, Sharon Phillips wrote:
>
> On 03/07/2007, at 3:28 AM, John Joyce wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jul 2, 2007, at 5:43 AM, Sharon Phillips wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I've run amuck Sunday afternoon trying to install fxRuby and fox
>>> under OSX, and after many hours of errors, trying mac-ports,
>>> fink, building from source, updating to Ruby 1.8.6 (from 1.8.4)
>>> and ripping various bits out and trying to replace them, I'm now
>>> in a complete mess.
>>>
>>> Any ideas from anyone as to how I wipe Ruby and start from
>>> scratch. I'm newish to the mac and unix. I can get around, edit
>>> files etc, but don't have much understanding behind what I do
>>> (any advice here much appreciated too). Just enough knowledge to
>>> be dangerous.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Dave
>>>
>>
>>
>> Uh, yeah, 1st of all... don't use more than one package manager on
>> a machine (any *nix). Fink or MacPorts not both. Results can be
>> unpredictable, though usually harmless.
>> Remove all of those. Remove all the stuff you installed.
>> Do a new clean install.
>> I recommend going with the building from source using the
>> Hivelogic installation guide. (google Ruby and OS X and Hivelogic,
>> you will find it, make sure to visit their home page first so that
>> you find the latest version of the installation guide)
>> This will give you more practice working at the unix command line,
>> but it will also help you become familiar with where and how stuff
>> is installed on your machine and in Ruby. While you're at it, pick
>> up the book "Learning Unix for OS X Tiger" (there is an older
>> panther version too) It is a gentle intro to unix. As a reference
>> ( for any type of unix) get "Unix in a Nutshell"
>>
>> You really won't get hurt and it is actually quite useful to know
>> a lot of that stuff. What's more, it's a heck of a lot easier to
>> install Ruby manually than PHP!!
>>
>
> Thanks John,
>
> I've seen the book I think, but have held off buying any Tiger
> books for about a year now as Leopard was 'imminent'... Seems like
> it might be a good idea anyway.
>
> I'll try stripping it all and building from source. I'm a pretty
> experiences Windows guy, but most of that knowledge is meaningless
> in the *nix world, so here's a dumb question: How do I remove all
> the stuff i installed? Finder doesn't seem to show a lot of places
> (which is good), and I'm not familiar with where everything goes.
> Also, am I limited to vi or pico when editing .profile files, or is
> it possible to use a gui based editor?
>
> Looks like I'll have to buy the book. :)
>
> Cheers,
> Dave
>
Oh yeah, you've got a lot to get up to speed on. Buy the tiger book,
pretty much all of it will still be valid with leopard. Probably all
of it. That and / or the Unix in A Nutshell book will also give you
advice about installing and uninstalling things like Fink and MacPorts.
The Unix in a Nutshell is actually even better. It covers all the OS
X specific stuff too.
The things you'll to learn about are the dot files ( they're just
hidden from the user by the dot )
and how to configure and control Bash. It's a lot and can be
confusing at first, but you don't need to memorize the stuff, just
have a good reference book or 2 handy. The nice thing about the
Nutshell book is that it also covers Linux and Solaris. This is
useful for web hosting ...
There is a free GUI text editor called TextWrangler. It's great and
free, but for Ruby in particular, the best is TextMate and it is
about 50 dollars, but very much worth it. There is also a TextMate
book from the Pragmatic Programmers, publishers of the pickaxe book
and it is available cheaply as a pdf ebook.
One more tip. in Terminal.app in OS X, you can save a copy of all the
stuff you do in a session. This can be useful to refer back to later.
Uninstalling is mostly a matter of deleting things.
I'm going to leave it to you to buy a book and get the commands,
because they'll also give you the details and warnings.
Unix is powerful.
Oh yeah, there is a Dashboard Widget for OS X that allows you to turn
on/off hidden files in the GUI conveniently. you can download free
from the apple site via Apple Menu > OS X Software...