Installing Ruby Gems with Native Extensions on Windows

If you’re stuck trying to run Ruby on Windows, one barrier you might have encountered is in trying to install a gem like ruby-debug or rdiscount. You’ll have seen an error like this: %gem install ruby-debug Building native extensions. This could take a while… ERROR: Error installing ruby-debug: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. …

Bring Git Joy to Windows

Since moving off Windows as my development platform, git has probably been the greatest treat. A great, lightweight, self-contained and very well thought-out piece of software, it’s one of those rare tools that once you’ve used it for a while, you can’t image how you worked without it. A lot of great ruby tools are …

SSH on Cygwin

I’m following Gina Trapani’s outstanding tutorials on lifehacker to get me some of that unix command-line joy on the rusty old windows box in the corner. Note to other linux-naive cygwin users out there. If you want to install the ssh command, look for the package called ‘openssh’. No amount of staring at the packages …