Debian GNU/Linux installation

(These instructions were written by Thomas Themel)

Installing tracks on Debian is a bit more complicated than it should be, mainly because Debian splits ruby into a multitude of packages, while authors of ruby packages seemingly tend to assume that they are all installed.

Installing Tracks requires Ruby on Rails, which in turn requires RubyGems.

To install RubyGems, you need to install the following Debian packages:

• ruby1.8
• libzlib-ruby
• libyaml-ruby

When these and their dependencies are set up, it should be possible to install RubyGems:

sokrates:/home/themel/ruby/rubygems-0.8.4# ruby setup.rb all
---> bin
[...]
  Successfully built RubyGem
  Name: sources
  Version: 0.0.1
  File: sources-0.0.1.gem
sokrates:/home/themel/ruby/rubygems-0.8.4#

For installation of the rails GEM, more Debian packages are required:

• libdrb-ruby
• liberb-ruby
• rdoc

RubyGems? can then install Ruby on Rails:

sokrates:/home/themel/ruby/rubygems-0.8.4# gem install rails
Attempting local installation of 'rails'
Local gem file not found: rails*.gem
Attempting remote installation of 'rails'
Updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Install required dependency rake? [Yn]  y 
Install required dependency activerecord? [Yn]  
Install required dependency actionpack? [Yn]  
Install required dependency actionmailer? [Yn]  
Successfully installed rails, version 0.9.5
Installing RDoc documentation for rails-0.9.5...
WARNING: Generating RDoc on .gem that may not have RDoc.

lib/rails_generator.rb:34:46: Skipping require of dynamic string: "#{path}/#{name}_generator.rb"
Installing RDoc documentation for rake-0.4.15...
Installing RDoc documentation for activerecord-1.6.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for actionpack-1.4.0...

lib/action_controller/scaffolding.rb:87:37: Skipping require of dynamic string: "#{model_id.id2name}"
Installing RDoc documentation for actionmailer-0.6.1...
sokrates:/home/themel/ruby/rubygems-0.8.4#

To run tracks, we need another Debian package:

• libwebrick-ruby

The final issue that I ran into is that the ruby MySQL client seems to expect the MySQL server socket in its default location in /tmp when the specified database host is localhost. Debian doesn't place the server socket in /tmp/mysql.socket, but rather in /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.socket. This causes the error

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

when starting tracks. To fix this, add a socket line to the appropriate environments in your config/database.yml:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: tracks
  host: localhost
  username: root
  password:
  socket: /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock

Happy GTDing!

Thomas Themel

Radagast has also had some success with Debian and Tracks, and posts detailed instructions here.