Ruby on Rails 3 and MySQL on Ubuntu 10.10
Ruby on Rails has become my favorite web framework recently. The sheer speed factor of development is incredible, and once you get past the learning curve, you can build anything in a short matter of time.
Recently my Asus laptop’s graphics card has become supported in the Ubuntu kernel so I now have a dual booting machine running both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. This is particularly handy now as I can use this laptop for development in Rails.
The steps aren’t hard to figure out on your own if you’re familiar with the tools, but this is what I did to get Rails 3 with MySQL on Ubuntu 10.10.
Installing Rails from Terminal
sudo apt-get install ruby-full
wget production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
tar -xvf rubygems-1.3.7.tgz
cd rubygems-1.3.7/
sudo ruby setup.rb
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
sudo gem install rdoc
sudo gem install rails
Installing MySQL Server from Terminal
sudo apt-get install mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev libmysql-ruby
Setting up your first Rails project
It seems that Rails 3 depends on sqlite3 even if you don’t intend to use it as the backend for your application. We’ll create an example rails app to make sure everything is working.
sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev build-essential
rails new example
cd example/
bundle install
rake db:create
rails s
Now fire up your browser, and go to and you should be greeted with a nice little rails homepage. 
**UPDATE: **I recently just ran these commands over again and ran into a “File not found: lib” error. After a bit of googling, I found this and appended the solution into the instructions above: