Ruby on Rails with Linux Mint Debian Edition

Advantages of LMDE over Ubuntu

• LMDE includes some of the necessary packages that Ubuntu and its derivatives lack.
• LMDE is faster, lighter, smoother, more refined, and more user-friendly than Ubuntu. LMDE replicates the look and feel of Linux Mint's traditional Ubuntu-based editions while bypassing the heavy Ubuntu overhead. This makes LMDE faster than its Ubuntu-based counterparts.
• Many people (including myself) don't like the recent changes in Ubuntu. I've tried both Ubuntu 11.04 and Xubuntu 11.04, and I didn't like working with them.

Advantages of GNOME over Xfce

• Linux Mint has always used GNOME in its main editions. Because the developers use GNOME more than any other desktop environment, the GNOME editions are probably better developed and debugged.
• The Xfce editions has Thunar 1.2.2 for its file manager. Thunar 1.2.2 has an annoying lag issue. The first time you open a Thunar window after booting up, Thunar freezes, and you have to wait a moment for it to operate normally. The GNOME edition of LMDE doesn't have Thunar and thus avoids this problem.
• In theory, LMDE with GNOME should be slower than LMDE with Xfce. In practice, I haven't noticed any difference even at 512 MB of RAM.

Procedure

1. Install Linux Mint Debian Edition in VirtualBox.
2. Use the Reload button in Synaptic or the "sudo apt-get update" command to update the software repository.
3. Use Synaptic or Apt-Get to install Git. (The package is git.)
4. Ruby is included with LMDE, but RubyGems and Rails are not. You need to use Apt-Get or Synaptic to install packages.
   • Some of the necessary packages are included with LMDE but not Ubuntu or Ubuntu-based distros. If you are using Ubuntu or a Ubuntu-based distro, you will need to add these packages: build-essential libruby ruby
   • If you need Ruby 1.8.7, install the following packages: libfcgi-dev rubygems ruby1.8-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libxslt1-dev
   • If you need Ruby 1.9.2 instead of Ruby 1.8.7, you need the following packages: libfcgi-dev ruby1.9.1 libruby1.9.1 ruby1.9.1-dev sqlite3 libsqlite3-dev libxslt1-dev
     
     You also need to remove the following packages: ruby ruby1.8 libruby1.8 ruby
     
     Note that RubyGems is included with Ruby 1.9.2.
5. In the command line, enter "ruby -v" to see what version of Ruby you have installed.
6. Enter "gem -v" to see what version of RubyGems you have installed.
7. To switch from the default version of RubyGems to a different version, install it from source. (This isn't the only way, but it works best for me.) Go to http://rubyforge.org, search for RubyGems, and download rubygems-(version number).tgz it into your /home/(username)/Downloads directory. Open a terminal window and enter each of the following commands to install:
   cd Downloads
   tar xzf rubygems-(version number).tgz
   cd rubygems-(version number)
   sudo ruby setup.rb
8. Enter "gem -v" to see what version of RubyGems is installed to verify that you have the desired version.
9. To install Rails and the SQLite3 database, enter the following commands:
   sudo gem install rails
   sudo gem install sqlite3
10. To see what version of Rails is activated, enter the command "rails -v".
11. To list what versions of Rails are installed, enter the command "gem list --local rails".
12. To install another version of Rails, enter "sudo gem install rails --version (version #)".
13. To uninstall a version of Rails, enter "sudo gem uninstall rails --version (version #)".