Alex Young <alex@blackkettle.org> writes:
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Alex Young wrote:
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
Gregory Brown wrote:
I think for
doing something like setting up apache + ruby/rails, pretty much any
distro will do for experimentation, though the debian based ones will
annoy you if you try to install ruby via apt.
That's a big negative in my book. 
How is Ruby installation
difficult on apt-based distros?
It's not the fact that it's apt which makes it difficult - it's the
historical packaging policies of Debian Ruby which splits the core
into separate packages for the interpreter, irb, rdoc, and so on,
which is confusing. If I remember correctly, there was talk a short
while ago of providing a meta-package which would pull all of these
together in a single 'apt-get install ruby-full' (or something) to
minimise irritation.
I tend to ignore that and use checkinstall, myself.
Isn't the RPM world the same, in terms of how the whole Ruby package set
is distributed? For example, if you install a Rails RPM it will pull in
only the packages it needs.
I wouldn't know. What would `yum install ruby` pull in? Judging from
this recipe:
http://oe.openendstudios.com/2007/1/19/fedora-core-5-and-ruby-on-rails-server-recipe
(first on Google, no idea of the accuracy), it looks like that's all you
need for ruby itself, but there will be others watching who can better
answer...
--
As someone who recently installed ruby and rails on a Debian system (Debian
Etch), I don't believe there are any "issues", even with the packaging system.
I simply used aptitude, selected the ruby version I wanted and aptitude pulled
in all the necessary dependencies and provided "Suggested/Recommended"
sections which contained additional ruby packages which were not essential but
were either recommended (i.e. you probably should install these, but you don't
have to) or suggested (i.e. these are not needed, but many users find them
useful).
With respect to the OPs original questions. I think that the rpath appliance
solution is a very interesting way to go if you just want to experiment.
Essentially, you use a virtual machine configuration based on either vmware or
zen and then you get/build an "appliance" using rpath's appliance builder (see
http://www.rpath.com). The appliance builder is a very simple way of creating a
minimal Linux distribution that meets your needs and which is run as either a
vmware or zen "image". One of the nice things with rpath is that they have two
levels of operation. You can purchase their appliance builder and create
specific images, which you can then release/sell as you want. This solution is
mainly for vendors who want to provide a simple consistent installation for
clients. Alternatively, they have their free system, which you run from their
site to build an image. With the free system, the only restriction is that you
make the image you build available to others. For example, the last time I
looked, they had both a zen and a vmware based LAMP image. If you wanted to
play around with linux using apache, mysql and perl, you could just grab this
image and put it on your system - very quick and very simple.
I think this would be a great way to experiment with ruby on Linux as you just
have a minimal Linux distro that is an image which you can load/unload as you
need. You don't have to worry about maintaining lots of irrelevant packages or
the potential security issues you can have with a full linux distro which you
don't/can't manage/configure etc, because you only have the minimal set of pa
packages necessary to do whatever it is you want to do.
We are starting to use this approach for managing all our servers within our
data centre. It makes administration a lot easier because each of these images
are like separate "sandboxes", so you don't get the horriffic dependency issues
you can get with a single server supporting multiple vendor applications (ie.e.
Oracle requiring version X of Java or Perl, a CMS wanting version X+1, another
app wanting version x+2 etc.
From an experimental perspective, this approach is really convenient as you
don't need to uninstall a system running (lets say Windows 2k) to make
available hardware to install a full Linux distro. Instead, you use vmware on
your w2k system and configure it to allow a virtual linux image, which is where
you might install an rpath Linux ruby image. When your not experimenting with
ruby on Linux, you just unload the image and have all your resources (minus
disk space for the image) available again.
I would recommend a system with at least 2Gb of memory for this approach.
However, given that 2Gb systems are more common, this isn't too much to ask.
You can do it with 1Gb, but you will notice a drop in performance. If its just
for experimentation, this probably isn't too much of an issue.
Tim
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--
tcross (at) rapttech dot com dot au