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Fixing 'mkmf' load error Ruby in Ubuntu

If you're a Debian or Ubuntu user you'll find that the Ruby standard distribution is split into lots of little packages so doing something like apt-get install ruby only gives you the ruby binary and a subset of the libraries for Ruby. You'll need to add more packages if you want to utilize more of Ruby's standard library. This is all in order to comply with Debian packaging Guidelines. That is all well and good but a little frustrating when you 'just want to do work'.

For example, I wanted to install sys-proctable (Something I really believe should be in Ruby's standard distribution) however ran into the following:
$ sudo gem install sys-proctable
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
extconf.rb:8:in `require': no such file to load -- mkmf (LoadError)
    from extconf.rb:8

ERROR: While executing gem ... (RuntimeError)
   ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
Gem files will remain installed in /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/sys-proctable-0.7.3 for inspection.

To get around this you will need to install ruby1.8-dev (or ruby1.6-dev or whatever version of ruby you're running) to get mkmf.rb which is listed in the Ruby Standard Library. I'm sure most Ruby hackers worth their salt consider this a 'duh' thing but not of all of us can be shining stars in the Ruby community

How I fixed it...
$ sudo apt-get install ruby1.8-dev
..
$ sudo gem install sys-proctable
Need to update 4 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org
....
complete
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ruby extconf.rb install sys-proctable
checking for rb_pid_t... yes
creating Makefile

make
gcc -fPIC -Wall -g -O2 -fPIC -I. -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i486-linux -I/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i486-linux -I. -DHAVE_TYPE_RB_PID_T -c proctable.c
gcc -shared -L"/usr/lib" -o proctable.so proctable.o -lruby1.8 -lpthread -ldl -lcrypt -lm -lc

make install
mkdir -p /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/sys-proctable-0.7.3/lib/sys
/usr/bin/install -c -m 0755 proctable.so /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/gems/sys-proctable-0.7.3/lib/sys

make clean
Successfully installed sys-proctable-0.7.3
Installing ri documentation for sys-proctable-0.7.3...
Installing RDoc documentation for sys-proctable-0.7.3...

[/al/ruby] permanent link