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I've been installing everything that is needed to run Ruby on Rails application onto a host (which is CentOS 4.x), which didn't even have Ruby installed, mySQL was too old and Apache didn't have required modules for running Mongrel clusters. So I had to install everything from the scratch, and the whole process was documented so I could repeat it in the future :) But may be this will helpful to someone else too, so here it is, right from my Yojimbo's note :)
Just one thing to notice. CentOS already has some of the required libs installed (zlib, libpng, libjpeg and freetype), so if you don't have them installed, do it before proceeding. I think there are plenty of info on this matter so I'll omit it.

Now, to the business.

RUBY

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
tar zxvf ruby-1.8.5.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.5
./configure
make
sudo make install

Warning! If you're on Mac, you have to use the following string to configure Ruby install:

./configure –prefix=/usr/local –enable-pthread

On Mac OS X, once you have installed Ruby, you have to fix default paths for your default shell, because Ruby installs itself to /usr/local/bin by default, and Apple's default binaries location is in /usr/bin. Do this in Terminal:

pico ~/.bash_login

# and paste the following text:
export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"
# save the file (Control-W) and relogin, or just re-open terminal session before proceeding.

RAILS : GEMS

wget http://rubyforge.rubyuser.de/rubygems/rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
tar zxvf rubygems-0.9.2.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.2
ruby setup.rb

RAILS: CORE (possible to use –include-dependencies, but i was getting some 'not found' error with this option)

#install the specific version, which happens to be 1.2.2 in this case.
gem install -v=1.2.2 rails

RAILS: STANDARD STUFF (possible to use –include-dependencies)

gem install capistrano
gem install mongrel
gem install mongrel_cluster
gem install gettext
gem install unicode

APACHE 2 with load balancer (for Mongrel cluster)

wget http://ftp.kddilabs.jp/infosystems/apache/httpd/httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz
tar zxvf httpd-2.2.4.tar.gz
cd httpd-2.2.4
./configure –enable-rewrite –enable-proxy –enable-load-balancer –enable-mods-shared=ALL
make
sudo make install

GHOSTSCRIPT & FONTS

# we need to install/update ghostscript and install ghostscript-fonts in order to get rid of the "`get_type_metrics': unable to read font `(null)' (Magick::ImageMagickError)" error:

wget http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ghostscript/ghostscript-8.56.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-8.56.tar.gz
cd ghostscript-8.56
./configure
make
sudo make install

wget http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/gs-fonts/ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
tar zxvf ghostscript-fonts-std-8.11.tar.gz
mv fonts /usr/local/share/ghostscript/8.56/

IMAGEMAGICK (required by RMagick)

wget ftp://ftp.u-aizu.ac.jp/pub/graphics/image/ImageMagick/imagemagick.org/ImageMagick-6.3.3-10.tar.gz
cd ImageMagick-6.3.3
./configure
make
sudo make install

RAILS: RMAGICK (manual install - I have always had multi-systems compatibility problems with the gem install)

wget http://files.rubyforge.mmmultiworks.com/rmagick/RMagick-1.15.4.tar.gz
tar zxvf RMagick-1.15.4.tar.gz
cd RMagick-1.15.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

MYSQL

wget http://ftp.iij.ad.jp/pub/db/mysql/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.0.37.tar.gz
tar zxvf mysql-5.0.37.tar.gz
cd mysql-5.0.37
./configure –with-extra-charsets=all –prefix=/usr/local/mysql
make
sudo make install

#in /etc/my.cnf
[mysqld]
set-variable = max_allowed_packet=32M # I upload large images into DBs, therefore need a bigger allowed packet size

(also need to change encodings to utf8)
default-character-set=utf8

SUBVERSION (required to capistrano deployment to work)

wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
wget http://subversion.tigris.org/downloads/subversion-deps-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf subversion-1.4.3.tar.gz
tar zxvf subversion-deps-1.4.3.tar.gz
cd subversion-1.4.3
./configure
make
sudo make install

That all folks :) Hope this was helpful.

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I have started a simple page about problems and solutions to them for PHP programmers who need to move their PHP codebase to ASP. Still a bit too simple, but oh well better something that nothing

ASP for PHP Programmers entry