Installing Jekyll on Ubuntu 10.04

Another small post…given that I’ve recently changed jobs and thus have new workstation(s) to install and configure as I like them, and that I recently purchased a used Lenovo T61 laptop (which BTW is running very well on Ubuntu 10.04/Lucid, perhaps fodder for another post) I’ve repeated a several software installations lately on Lucid, including getting jekyll running locally so I can review blog posts before I send them up to github to run serverascode.com.

When you run gem install jekyll on Lucid, you will recieve this error message:

$ grep -i release /etc/lsb-release 
DISTRIB_RELEASE=10.04
$ gem install jekyll
ERROR:  Error installing jekyll:
	liquid requires RubyGems version >= 1.3.7

Lucid comes with @gem 1.3.5@ which is not the version that Jekyll’s gem requires. When searching for the error message I found this post which describes one way of getting jekyll running on lucid, which is to install the gem package from Ubuntu 10.10. Now, obviously installing a package from what essentially is a different version of Ubuntu isn’t usually a recommended way to go, it’s certainly a quick and easy one (duh! :) ). I downloaded the rubygems1.8_1.3.7-2 package and installed it. Then I was able to run gem install jekyll and then run jekyll:

$ jekyll --server --auto
Configuration from /ccollicutt.github.com/_config.yml
Auto-regenerating enabled: /ccollicutt.github.com -> ccollicutt.github.com/_site
[2011-04-20 13:20:25] regeneration: 12 files changed
[2011-04-20 13:20:25] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-04-20 13:20:25] INFO  ruby 1.8.7 (2010-01-10) [x86_64-linux]
[2011-04-20 13:20:30] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=7082 port=4000
SNIP!

It remains to be seen if I’ll run into issues with having the gem from Ubuntu 10.10 running on Ubuntu 10.04. I’ll update this post if I do. :)