Getting Rails Running on Ubuntu

Time to check out the Rails hype. I borrowed Agile Web Development With Rails, 2nd Edition, from a coworker, and have started working my way through it. So far, so fun. The details:

I'm doing this under Ubuntu, so I figured I'd install via Synaptic. I grabbed just about everything I thought I might need, and started through the book. I got to p. 39, which has a couple of rake commands. These commands failed, and as part of troubleshooting, found https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RubyOnRails. Following its advice, I removed rails and gems from Synaptic, and ran #1, #2 "Install RubyGems via source (recommended)", then #3 and #4. I then tried the commands again, and they worked just fine.

Well, almost fine. When I got around to running gem update --system, I got the following:

Updating RubyGems...
Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org
Attempting remote update of rubygems-update
ERROR:  While executing gem ... (Gem::GemNotFoundException)
    Could not find rubygems-update (> 0) in any repository

On a lark, I ran the same command again, and it ran just fine. Go figure.

I then generated my own rails api docs with the rake doc:rails command, and was able to proceed.

So far, so fun.