fleshyorgans

For anyone else who needs to do this:

Compiling Ruby 1.8.5 on an ancient redhat box is difficult. It’s not as simple as just make/make install… it doesn’t work right out of the box. My solution was to statically link ruby during compilation.

1. Grab the source
2. Extract
3. Do “./configure”
4. Edit ext/Setup (a text file), and uncomment everything except for
   1. openssl (unless you have openssl 0.9.7 or higher)
   2. pty
   3. Wil32API
   4. win32ole
5. Move ext/openssl out of the install directory
6. ‘make’
7. su, then ‘make install’

This got me a working ruby installation, minus openssl and pty. The problems I was running into were library related, mainly glibc, libssl, and crypt libraries. It’s certainly possible to get a working installation without all the monkeying around with statically linked executables, but I was running a risk of destabilizing the rest of the system by doing that.

Note: Your Mileage May Vary

Good luck!