Running Rails On Debian

During my Switch To Debian, I had to get rails runnning on my laptop. My first try, I could not get the rails command to work - had the classic write_inheritable_attribute problem. However, this time, the problem was not the iconv library, as activesupport loaded fine.

Instead, it appeared to be a missing require 'rubygems' from the script.

I got it working, but could not start the server. It said my version of rubygems was out of date and I needed to update it with gem update --system. Nice, except I ran it and got:

ERROR: While executing gem ... (RuntimeError)
gem update --system is disabled on Debian. RubyGems can be updated using the official Debian repositories by aptitude or apt-get.

I found the answer, to build rubygems 1.3.1 from source, and then gem update --system worked. See the post here.