Cygwin version of Ruby is currently broken

Apparently the version of Ruby in the current Cygwin Ruby package has a bug that breaks the latest version of Rails.

I decided to play round a little with Rails 2.0 the other day.  When I ran the “rails” command to create a new project, I got an error message about /dev/urandom (sorry, I should have written it down).   After doing a few google searches, I discovered it’s apparently a bug that’s been recently fixed in Ruby.  (see this bug report).   Unfortunately, the Cygwin package of Ruby still hasn’t been updated to the fixed version.

If you run Ruby under Cygwin, here’s a workaround until there’s an updated Cygwin Ruby package:

1) uninstall any gem’s you’ve installed (run “gem list –local” , then do a “gem uninstall” for each one.)

2) use the Cygwin setup application to uninstall the Cygwin version of Ruby.

3) while you’re in the Cygwin setup application, make sure you’ve installed the openssl-devel package.  If you don’t, Ruby will appear to compile correctly, but it’ll be missing crypto support that’s necessary for the latest versions of Rails.

4) download the latest stable snapshot release of the Ruby source.

5) untar the Ruby source to the directory of your choosing (I recommend /usr/local/src).

6) follow the instructions in the included README to install.   (./configure; make; make install)

7) Download the latest version of Ruby Gem

untar to the directory of your choosing (I still recommend /usr/local/src ).

9) follow the instructions in the included README to install ( ruby setup.rb)

10) use gem to reinstall any gems you need, like rails.

It actually takes a lot less time to do than it sounds like it would.  Hopefully there’ll be an updated Cygwin package soon, but until then, this is the best solution.   I did try to use the Ruby One-Click Installer for Windows, but using that under Cygwin is just an enormous pain in the ass.

More nails in the coffin of big, proprietary systems.

While I was going through the backlog of unread stuff in my feedreader, I came across two interesting items that I see as quasi-related. The first is a blog post from Allan Packer entitled “Are Proprietary Databased Doomed?”. In the post, Allan talks about a number of reasons why the big proprietary databases from vendors like Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft are doomed, which basically boils down to (IMHO) to 2 big things:

• Proprietary databases are more expensive
• Open source databases have gotten “good enough” to be feature equivalent to the more expensive databases for 80-90% of uses.

The second item that caught my eye was an article about the NYSE’s decision to replace it’s proprietary Unix server with commodity X86 servers running Linux.

What’s interesting to me about these two articles juxtaposed together is that, although they’re talking about two different product categories, databases in one case, operating systems in the other, the arguments in each case are virtually interchangeable. And in both cases, they paint a pretty bleak picture for the future of big, expensive, proprietary systems.