Problems w/ Zlib, Ruby, Gems, Rails?

If you experience problems with zlib and rubygems you are not alone. With practically every Rails installation that I’ve done, I have encountered some sort of problem with zlib and rubygems. So, I wanted to highlight my latest installation woes in case anyone else out there could benefit from the steps that I took. Here we go…

I’m starting with a hefty 2 x dual core AMD 64 Opteron machine and this is what I do. - I grab the latest Ruby source (1.8.5). - I’m also a big fan of Yum, the nifty package manager that makes installation and maintenance of Linux machines a breeze (well, not always), so I use Yum to grab needed developer packages like gcc, gcc-cpp, zlib, and the corresponding “-devel” packages. - I configure, make, make install Ruby - I grab the latest RubyGems source (0.9.2) and install it - I then attempt to install Rails with dependencies (gem install rails—include-dependencies), but I get the following error: gzip error installing rake-0.7.2.gem - After searching on the web and finding nothing helpful, I decide to try removing the current ruby gems installation and using rubygems 0.9.0 - Unfortunately, this just causes another error related to zlib: gzip error installing sources-0.0.1.gem - Finally, here’s what fixed the problem: 1) uninstall ruby (recursively delete the main ruby folder) 2) install zlib 1.2.3 from source 3) re-install Ruby 4) re-install RubyGems

Voila—it works! So, the moral of the story is that sometimes the Yum package manager doesn’t install zlib properly and you may need to install from the source.