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I was installing Rubygems 1.2.0 on Ubuntu 7.04 on Friday, something I’ve done many times but for the first time I saw this error when I ran sudo ruby setup.rb

./lib/rubygems/spec_fetcher.rb:1:in `require': no such file to load -- zlib (LoadError)
	from ./lib/rubygems/spec_fetcher.rb:1
	from ./lib/rubygems/source_index.rb:10:in `require'
	from ./lib/rubygems/source_index.rb:10
	from ./lib/rubygems.rb:767:in `require'
	from ./lib/rubygems.rb:767
	from setup.rb:22:in `require'
	from setup.rb:22

Having a look around the web yielded several approaches to solve the problem but no solution so I decided to build Zlib from source, then rebuild Ruby and then install Rubygems. That worked.

Here it is step by step.
I assume you already have the ruby and rubygems sources at this point.

1. Change directory to wherever you keep source files. I use ~/src. Download and extract the Zlib source tarball to that directory.

       cd ~/src
       wget http://www.zlib.net/zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz
       tar -xzf zlib-1.2.3.tar.gz

2. Build Zlib

       cd ./zlib-1.2.3
       ./configure
       make
       sudo make install

3. Rebuild ruby

       cd ~/src/ruby-1.8.6-p114
       ./configure
       make
       sudo make install

4. and finally install Rubygems

       cd ~/src/rubygems-1.2.0
       sudo ruby setup.rb

You should be up and running now.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 10:01 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.