A couple of days ago I mentioned a few of my woes with the latest release of Ubuntu. Since then, I’ve installed Ruby on Rails and have found a work around for the continued problems I’ve had in accessing my samba shares using the “Connect to Server…” option in Nautilus. If you’re experiencing the symptoms described in bug report #208531, then you might want to give smbmount a try. From the command-line, type:

smbmount //{server}/{share} /home/{user}/{share} -o username={server_username}

To unmount the share:

sudo umount /home/{user}/{share}

I’m using this as a temporary solution until the bug in Nautilus is resolved. Your mileage may vary.

*The statements above were written under the assumption that you’ve created a folder within your home directory for mounting the share.

This Thursday, Canonical released Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, into the wild. Like many others, I immediately fired up a torrent and began downloading. From what I read of the aftermath, many launch day downloaders were not as lucky. Most Torrent servers became immediately inaccessible due to Hardy Heron’s popular demand. It has been three days and the US update servers are still saturated. This happens every release and can only mean that Ubuntu’s userbase is steadily growing.

My installation went well, but with any new OS release comes problems and Hardy Heron was not an exception. I couldn’t connect to my NAS through Nautilus. None of my browser extensions worked and Ruby on Rails was MIA. I decided to fix Rails first. Here are the steps I took to install Ruby on Rails on Ubuntu, Hardy Heron.

sudo apt-get install ruby

At this point I could not install Ruby on Rails with RubyGems because of the following exception:

/usr/bin/gem:23: uninitialized constant Gem::GemRunner(NameError)

I opened up the source file and edited the offending line.

sudo gedit /usr/bin/gem

Adding require ‘rubygems/gem_runner’ to the source file,

require 'rubygems'
require 'rubygems/gem_runner'

I was then able to update RubyGems

sudo gem install rubygems-update

and install Ruby on Rails and the Mongrel web server.

sudo gem install rails mongrel

At this point I had a working version of Rails on my installation of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron. To get back to work the only thing missing was the NetBeans Ruby IDE. If you haven’t tried NetBeans for your Ruby on Rails projects, I highly recommend it. It’s located in the repos and only takes a few plugins to have Rails support out of the box.

I’ve had the itch this week to try out a few of Ruby’s game development libraries. I decided to start with Gosu. Gosu is a 2D game development library for the Ruby and C++ programming languages. It’s available for the Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux platforms and integrates with both the RMagick image processing library and the Chipmunk physics library.

Unfortunately the library is only available as a gem for Mac OS X and Windows. As a Linux user I’ve become accustom to compiling my own libraries, but this often means downloading and compiling dependencies, swearing, and a lot of Googling. I was lucky. Compiling Gosu only caused a few hairs to fall out.

If you’re an Ubuntu Feisty user, you’ll need to add the following line to the LargeImageData.hpp file located in the gosu-source-0.7.7/Gosulmpl/Graphics directory:

#include <boost/none.hpp>

This line adds a reference needed on line 31 of the LargeImageData class. With this addition, you can then execute the commands below from the gosu-source-0.7.7/linux directory to compile the Gosu game development library.

$ autoconf
$ ./configure
$ make

The make file provided with the source does not add the compiled gosu.so file to the Ruby lib directory. I chose to do this manually rather than edit the make file. Just issue the following command from the gosu-source-0.7.7/linux directory to add your newly compiled library.

$ sudo cp gosu.so /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/i486-linux/gosu.so

With a little elbow grease I successfully compiled the Gosu game development library on Ubuntu Feisty. I’ll dig into some tutorials next and post back with my results.

Be sure to check out Gosu’s, Getting Started on Linux, for a list of dependencies and compilation instructions.