More and more being pushed to using a Mac or Linux, latest hassle is trying to get Ruby on Rails to run in Win98 and giving up for the first time after about five hours of trying. Thought things would be a breeze, Python runs really well on my Win98 box so figured Ruby would sail along too, but it’s not to be. Too many problems to count, all the tutorials and docs are for XP, so the paths aren’t correct to begin with. I never did get the command line running for it, although the autoexec file has the paths set correctly as far as I can tell.
No problem, they have a one-click installer right? Downloaded that 84MB monstrosity and away we go. Everything looks okay, then fire the thing up and the mouse is frozen for about three minutes while the server and database starts up. Okay, I know that they use a fair amount of resources, but this is ridiculous, I’m running 512MB RAM at +1Ghz, this is progress?
The thing finally gets going and I can move the mouse again, and start to go through the tutorial looking forward to the “super productive new way to develop web applications” thing to happen. Start out with an explanation for what the folders created for a web site are for, no problem there and moving right along. Get to the part to test the thing, and the Congratulations! comes up in the browser, we may have something here. Then it’s time to actually go to the web site we’re supposed to be creating, and after five minutes or so of waiting for the redirect to load up, it’s time to try another angle on this thing, not getting far very fast at all this way, think the ports need changing or something.
So… decision time, wait until an XP box, (have to pay for the Pro version as well, gawd M$ sucks!), shows up around here so everything works the way they say it’s going to locally, or bye to Win98 while learning this thing. With the part time job gone, think I’ll work on the new xhtml/css conversion program mainly, and do this Ruby on Rails stuff only in spare time. Looking through what is available, also wonder if my own personal library of script snippets and appys already has the same things in it?