Minplass.net

Read on some (several) technews sites today that a guy named Nick Saber got (all) his Google accounts disabled. That made me think harder of something that has been on my mind for a good while;

Google isn’t all white. Google is a megacorp, and probably slightly less evil than most megacorps, but still, now I feel I cannot trust them.

What will i do?

I’ll still use Googles great tools, and email, but for important stuff, I’ll gradually change from them to my own domain, and not make Google a single point of failure.

Why?

Well.. After reading about poor Nick (half hour ago), I tried to find some info on what Googles response was, but I found little or nothing. - Made me think “Can they just do things like that with no reason and just dont care?”

Conclusion?

I cannot trust Google (anymore).

When you install something in Ubuntu that is not from the repositories, chances are that it’s installed outside Ubuntus default paths.

A way to fix this is to add this line:

PATH=/path/to/directory/that/contains/binary:$PATH

to the end of .bashrc (which is in your home directory) (exchange /path/to/directory/that/contains/binary with the actual path to the directory where the file you want to use from bash is)

This should be the same for most Linux distros that uses .bashrc

I use Ubuntu for work, and I have found this to be the best and most consistent way to install Ruby on Rails:

First, set up software sources (System -> Administration -> Software Sources) to include universe and multiverse. Throw in restricted too, it doesn’t hurt a lot. Include the partner repositories from the “Third-Party Software” tab and backports from “Updates” tab as well.

Now we can install a relatively current version of ruby and rubygems:

sudo apt-get install build-essential ruby-full rubygems

This should take a few minutes with downloading and installing, and when it’s done, you should have ruby and gem available in the terminal.

Next is using gem to install Ruby on Rails and mongrel:

sudo gem install rails

sudo gem install mongrel

One last step to make things good: Open .bashrc in your home directory (with your favorite text editor) Add this line at the end:

PATH=/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH

There! A few easy steps, and you have rails directly from gems, not being dependant of the mood of Ubuntu package managers.