E X P R E S S I C A

It was ruining all my mood and concentration when i was trying some sample ruby code in irb and again and again i had to retype the things because the arrow keys were not working there. I searched the problem on net and found that i need to have readline library on my linux and in ruby as well. Now the point is readline should be available on the linux before you compile ruby so as you can give the readline option while compiling ruby. BUT we have ruby already installed !! Now What ?

Now, first you will need to install system based readline libraries as

[source:ruby]
sudo apt-get install libreadline5 libreadline5-dev
[/source]

If you are not able to install linux based readline with the above method the refer this for more details.

Now you will need to compile the ruby based readline interface to let you readline library available in irb.
Do it by this…

[source:ruby]
cd /usr/local/src/ruby-1.8.6/ext/readline
sudo ruby extconf.rb
sudo make
sudo make install
[/source]

thats it, all done!!
Try your tips on arrow keys in irb, it should work now.
enjoy!!

While installing RMagick on Linux, if you are getting errors like this
“GraphicsMagick-config… no configure: error: Can’t install RMagick. Can’t find Magick-config or GraphicsMagick-config program. …”,
below is the solution for this error.

RMagick requires ImageMagick and which further requires loads of dependencies already available to get installed and work properly. I was figuring out of those all, and thank god got a quite simple and elegant way to do all that in just three commands.
First you will have to install imagemagick then libmagick9-dev and then finally you can install rmagick.

Here are the commands…

[source:ruby]
sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install libmagick9-dev
sudo gem install rmagick
[/source]