Installing Ruby 1.9.3 on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pengolin (without RVM)

02 MAY, 2012
The new Ubuntu release has just rolled around and with it a slew of new packages. Personally, I'm tracking the development of Ruby quite closely but the default Ruby on Ubuntu ist still the 1.8 series which I can't recommend. Ruby 1.9 has some performance improvements and 1.9.3 in particular a lot of them compared to 1.9.2.

However, as I have elaborated in a previous post getting the Ruby 1.9 series on Ubuntu without using RVM instead of 1.8 isn't all that easy. Please read the post if you are interested in the details.

The short version is: You can get Ruby 1.9.3-p0 by installing the ruby-1.9.1 package. (The package is called 1.9.1 because that is the ABI version.)

If you want to make Ruby 1.9 the default do the following:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install ruby1.9.1 ruby1.9.1-dev 
  rubygems1.9.1 irb1.9.1 ri1.9.1 rdoc1.9.1 
  build-essential libopenssl-ruby1.9.1 libssl-dev zlib1g-dev

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/ruby ruby /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 400 
         --slave   /usr/share/man/man1/ruby.1.gz ruby.1.gz 
                        /usr/share/man/man1/ruby1.9.1.1.gz 
        --slave   /usr/bin/ri ri /usr/bin/ri1.9.1 
        --slave   /usr/bin/irb irb /usr/bin/irb1.9.1 
        --slave   /usr/bin/rdoc rdoc /usr/bin/rdoc1.9.1

# choose your interpreter
# changes symlinks for /usr/bin/ruby , /usr/bin/gem
# /usr/bin/irb, /usr/bin/ri and man (1) ruby
sudo update-alternatives --config ruby
sudo update-alternatives --config gem

now try

ruby --version