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Last friday Muness pointed out to me a blaring problem with the Ruby version that is packaged with Ubuntu 7.10. It seems as though the packaged version you get with apt is 1.8.6-p36. This is not good, and is certainly not production ready. Now you're thinking to yourself "ok, I will just uninstall the packaged version and compile my own version". I always recommend against that whenever you can avoid it. Using the package manager that comes with your OS is always the best way to handle software for a number of reasons. The most important being updates and fixes are pushed to you and it's easy to update. Since I prefer using this method for installing software I took the liberty of re-packaging ruby for Ubuntu 7.10. I created all the possible ruby packages for both i386 (32-bit) and x64 (64bit intel / amd) versions of Ubuntu. You can grab the tarballs respectively:

http://opensource.thinkrelevance.com/browser/system/ubuntu/ruby/i386/ruby1.8-ubuntu-i386.tar.bz2
http://opensource.thinkrelevance.com/browser/system/ubuntu/ruby/x64/ruby1.8-ubuntu-x64.tar.bz2

Once you have the packages install them like so:

% tar -xvjf ruby1.8-ubuntu-(arch).tar.bz2
% cd debs
% sudo dpkg -i *

This will install all of the packages for you. If you have the other versions installed it will simply replace them with the new hotness. If you don't want all the packages you can pick and choose which ones you want just substituting the * with the full package name. Once you have done this you will have a real production ready version of ruby on your server and can feel a little bit better about your application's run-ability.