LinRails — Ruby On Rails For Linux

foobarf00 writes "LinRails is a binary package that includes Ruby-1.8.6, Rubygems-0.9.4, Rails 1.2.3, Mongrel 1.0.1, MySQL-5.0.41, ncurses-5.6, OpenSSL-0.9.8e, and zlib-1.2.3. Its goal is to make it easy to get a Ruby on Rails development environment running in no time. This initial 0.1 release doesn't have a Web server in the package; opinions are solicited as to which to include."

Aptitude

[thechanklybore]

Makes this so easy it's hardly worth the packaging bother. Although I guess people still saddled with the atrocious Yum will like it.

Fantastic

[PopeRatzo]

This is great news for me. I recently built an Ubuntu system on which to do media production (music, video, like that). It's not my primary system yet, but I've been so disgusted with Windows Vista and Mac OS that I decided it was time to make (another) try at doing my work on a Linux system.

After three months, the results have far exceeded my expectation. I'm very impressed with the maturity of music production apps for Linux and the performance has been as strong as I expected. I'm still a Linux noob, but the experience has been positively inspirational. In fact, it's been a lot like my first experiences with media production on my first Mac, where just about every day brought another new way to look at the work.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm learning Ruby and this new release gives me one more reason to sit down at the Linux box instead of my others.

Apache?

[Enderandrew]

Color me stupid here, but isn't Apache the de facto standard that most everyone uses?

Some may argue that better alternatives exist (of which I'm not really aware) but since Apache is so popular and common place, wouldn't it seem the logical piece of this meta-package?

People who want specific packages for specific reasons are going to set up their own environment. For a pre-setup environment, shouldn't you shoot for the common setup?

Re:Apache?

[andr0meda]

Agreed.

Apache is not only the most widely used web server, it is also the most supported one, of good quality, and offers countless possibilities alongside the purpose of your typical RR demo program, which is nice to have if you think like a biz.

Re:Why MySQL

[killjoe]

Why bother with either. Just include sqlite and be done with it. Rails can take care of all the data integrity for you anyway. Combine that with microapache and you are done.

Show me one site....

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read a little about Ruby on Rails. Will somebody list one site that's on Rails and is worth a flip? I've seen the hype, but I'd love to see a site that talks the talk. Thanks!

Mongrel is a web server

[Gunark]

Mongrel is a web server, hence this package includes a web server (unless it doesn't actually contain Mongrel, despite what the writeup says). Also, Ruby 1.8.6 comes with WEBrick, which is a the web server Rails uses by default...

Anyway isn't a simplified Rails installer for Linux kind of redundant? Most newer Linux distros I've seen already have a native package that installs Ruby on Rails and all its dependencies. Most people will probably find the Instant Rails [rubyforge.org] package a lot more useful, since it does the same for Windows.

Ok, on site

[Colin Smith]

We have Oracle 8, Sybase 12 and postgresql 8 (I think).

The whole factory is run off of postgresql.
The financial system is run off of Oracle.
The timesheet system is run off of Sybase.

Guess the systems which gave the most and least problems.

The winner is PostgreSQL. Untouched for months, perhaps even years. Next we have Oracle which is a pain in the arse to manage but never failed. and last place came sybase which had to be touched, managed and/or restarted regularly[1].

In terms of transactions, the factory systems took an absolute pounding, the financial system was used extensively daily and the timesheet system got maybe thousand updates per day.

PostgreSQL's largest benefit is reliability.

[1] Clearly these attributes are what made Sybase the product of choice for Microsoft to build their enterprise database management system upon.
 

Is it still single-threaded?

[Sanity]

Last time I checked, Mongrel was still single threaded, meaning that if you wanted to put together a decent website, you had to run multiple mongrel instances and have Apache load balance between them. The unfortunate reality of Rails in my experience, having deployed several Rails websites (example [revver.com]), is that it is still a toy, it certainly isn't "enterprise ready", and while its possible to make it scale, its an uphill struggle (I'm not the only one [radicalbehavior.com] who thinks so).

I can, on the other hand, highly recommend Wicket [sf.net], its what we used to build Thoof [thoof.com], and so-far its scaling very well indeed.

Re:What's your problem with Cake and/or Symfony?

[samjensen]

Care to elaborate? I'd like an educated opinion, why you think these aren't worth it. Do you have real experience with them or did you just dick around with each for 20 minutes?

I did say that based on a quick hour-or-less session I did with several PHP frameworks. I checked out Symfony, Cake, Qcodo, Zend framework, and I may have taken a cursory look at a couple other. After evaluating those last summer (about a year ago exactly) I ended up using the Zend framework for that project.

Both Symfony and Cake seemed nice at first, but I couldn't even follow their 101 tutorials because the instructions were not correct for the current stable versions. Sure I could have figured it out, but when I have a fairly short time to evaluate these things I'm not going to start diving into the source just to get started! I didn't have to do that with Rails, and I didn't have to do that with the Zend framework (which was at v0.14 at the time).

Qcodo is interesting. Seagull looked fairly interesting as well, but this was a small internal project and the Zend framework fit the bill nicely.

So it was based on a quick 20-minute dicking around. If you're very interested in the projects then they may work well for you, and for all I know the docs actually match the code by now which I guess was the biggest turn off.

Or is it PHP that you don't like? I'm really interested. Propels XML is the only potential downside I can see. And that doesn't seen to much of a problem.

I won't pretend to be a PHP fan but that didn't factor into my choice of framework since it had to be done in PHP. I didn't take more than a 20-minute glance at Propels (as part of Symfony iirc) so I don't have much of an opinion on it.

Cake and Symfony try very hard to be Rails. If you have a choice of language I strongly urge anyone looking at those 2 to just use the real deal instead. If you want to use PHP then I would still urge you to look at Prado, Seagull, Zend framework or Qcodo before these 2. At least those have some unique features and direction, rather than just picking up the scraps Rails throws away.