getting wxRuby to work on Ubuntu 11.10

I've just subscribed to this list and now see another went through a  
similar process about the same time. I made a page on the wxRuby wiki  
with some notes about the eventual success but I am not satisfied so  
will be working on a better process.  
http://wxruby.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?Building_WxRuby_2.0.1

That page is not meant to be a formal how-to but more so information  
on some of the pitfalls that occured to help others get wxRuby  
working. I certainly appreciate the efforts by all who have worked on  
this project. Have you looked at the support code for this ? I look  
and see not man hours of work but years.

I started off wanting the latest stable ruby (1.9.3) working on my  
x86_64 Ubuntu 11.10 distribution with the latest wxWidgets (2.9.3).  
There were some set backs.

The wxRuby archive is 2009, set up for wxWidgets 2.6-8.x and ruby 1.9  
was freshly supported. Linux kernel was 2.4.x. So, there have been  
changes since then :)

I thought, ok this is great to get my code skills back in shape and I  
was really tired of recompile cycles so wanted to use ruby to be my  
main logic engine for my next projects. I'm not a complete newb but  
haven't coded in Linux for around two years so am very rusty.

I want current systems so started by with a fresh isntall of Ubuntu  
11.10 Desktop x86_64. I installed the wxWidget package - saw it was  
only 2.8.11 so uninstalled and dl'ed wx 2.9.3, compiled and  
exverything looked good aside the response time for wxAUI. I then  
recompiled Ubuntu to enable 1000 Hz; much smoother desktop response now.

I went through a lengthy process of getting 1.9.3 to work with my IDE  
development tools. I wanted the latest and greatest but it took effort  
of compiling and getting ruby-debug to work with my IDE (used NetBeans  
in the past but the latest does not support ruby so went with  
RubyMine). I eventually worked out .rvm and the various paths. So I  
now have a working ruby 1.9.3 p21, in a nice IDE with debug support. I  
then started with wxRuby, which didn't work.

I spent about a week gettig wxRuby to work. I was scouring the  
internet for clues and leanred a lot about what has happened in the  
past few years of ruby, linux and wx development. The end result is  
what I put in the wiki notes. It came down to not having time to make  
an initial demo of a working ruby wx development system.

I wound up using Ubuntu's wxWidgets 2.8.11 package which had all the  
libraries separated, including the the contributed ones (which is  
contrayry to the build notes on the wiki about haveing a monolithic wx  
build - as I understood it at the time). I located SWIG 1.3.38 and it  
seemed fine.

I had to edit some rake build files due to the more modern gcc being  
stricter and treating warnings as errors. As my skill comes back, I  
will probably remember what I should really do with that issue. Part  
of the trouble is string handling which is changed in wx 2.9.3 anyway  
so there will be a lot of focus in that area eventually.

In the end I now have an initial dev environment I can sneak out demo  
code while working on what i really want which is a fully modern  
ruby/wx dev environment. This means at least ruby 1.9.3 and wx 2.9.3  
working together on a 64 bit linux machine with modern kernel glibc 3  
etc.

That is the short story. The long story involved a lot of back  
tracking, compiling various things, dealing with incompatible  
ruby-debug support gems. One example is, "Why not just use the x86_64  
gem from the repository ?" I did but the lib was linked against glibc  
2.14 and Ubuntu is 2.13 Future Ubuntu 12.x is still using 2.14, btw.

I'm going to make a post in the development list about wanting to help  
modernize the work. wx will be changing quite a bit, ruby already has  
with ruby 2.0 in the development head. We need to update the project.

TK