Vanishing Ruby Gems

Question

I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 and I installed Ruby and Ruby on Rails following the directions on this site. The exact directions I followed are no longer there as it appears the rubyonrails.org wiki has changed recently. But I installed it the long way. Installed Ruby, then Gems, then installed Rails using "gem install rails". I haven't really messed with Rails for a while, and I tried to use the Gem command today and...

   The program 'gem' can be found in the following packages:
    * rubygems1.8
    * rubygems1.9
   Try: sudo apt-get install <selected package>
   bash: gem: command not found

That's just weird to me because I installed rails using the gem command. I have been seaching my computer for the gems binary so I could create a link to it in the bin directory but I can't find it. I know it's installed becaues when I run 'script/server' and go to localhost:3000 in a browser I get the following version information:

Ruby version    1.8.7 (i486-linux)
RubyGems version    1.3.1
Rails version   2.2.2
Active Record version   2.2.2
Action Pack version 2.2.2
Active Resource version 2.2.2
Action Mailer version   2.2.2
Active Support version  2.2.2

Anyone know how I can get my gem command working again? Thanks for any help.

Note: I am new to Rails and fairly new to Ubuntu and Linux in general.

Answer 1

You could look to see if it's in:

/usr/bin/gem1.8

if it is, then symlink /usr/bin/gem to it:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem

BTW, here's another tutorial on how to install rails on Ubuntu 8.10:

http://articles.slicehost.com/2009/1/6/ubuntu-intrepid-ruby-on-rails

Answer 2

Did you install rubygems from apt-get? If yes, maybe you should try to remove it and install it from source.

Here is another article on installing Rails on Ubuntu:

http://www.rubyinside.com/how-to-install-a-ruby-18-stack-on-ubuntu-810-from-scratch-1566.html

Essentially, you can install Ruby from apt-get or source, but it's recommended to install rubygems from source.