Benedict’s Babeldom

I’ve been trying to start a small project to teach myself ruby. Unfortunately, I decided to do this right when _why disappeared from the internet. I had been planning on using Shoes, his ruby gui toolkit, but all his sites disappearing has made it a bit more difficult.

I spent a couple days wrestling with getting everything working. It retrospect it took an embarrassing amount of time once I knew what to do, but when isn’t that the case? Here’s the steps I took in case anyone else is interested. I did this on Ubuntu, so I use apt-get. For other os’s, check the why repository mirror on github at http://github.com/whymirror.

1) sudo apt-get install ruby-full :: I was missing some dependencies required for shoes when I didn’t get the full ruby install the first time I installed it. I spent a lot of time hunting around for what I was missing, but this seemed to take care of everything.

2) sudo apt-get install shoes :: I originally downloaded shoes off of the github mirror, but using apt-get makes the process much simpler.

From there I recommend reading why’s shoes tutorial/guide/novel, “nobody knows shoes”. This guide disappeared along with everything else related to why, but it has been reposted in other places. This post has download links for both “why’s poignant guide to ruby” and “nobody knows shoes.”