Trying to install Phusion Passenger gem on debian

Question

I tried do

gem1.8 install passenger

but I get the following error

ERROR:  could not find gem passenger locally or in a repository

Which I don't understand, cause it clearly is in the repository

gem1.8 list -r | grep passenger

returns

colouringcode-passenger (0.1)
passenger (2.2.9)
passenger-recipes (0.1.2)
passenger_debugger (0.1.3)

where do I go from here? I'm stumped?

Answer 1

maybe try:

sudo gem install passenger

Answer 2

I tried this a couple of hours later and it worked, perhaps it was some intermittent problem with gem