Andy Chase

I decided to install RubyGems and the Rails framework on my PowerBook so that I might follow along with ONLamp’s breathless Rolling with Ruby on Rails tutorial, but when I tried to complete the installation of RubyGems with the following statement in the Terminal:

% sudo ruby setup.rb install

It kept bombing out with the error

hook /Users/andy/Desktop/rubygems-0.8.4/./post-install.rb failed:
wrong # of arguments(2 for 1)

You know you’re in trouble when Google comes up with fewer than ten results for the exact error you’re researching.

However, given that OS X has a relatively old version of Ruby preinstalled (1.6.8), I suspected that might be the issue and gave the slightly newer Ruby package for Fink a try instead. (You do have Fink installed, don’t you?) The install went like a charm – just be sure to use the Fink executable, not the native OS X one:

% sudo /sw/bin/ruby setup.rb config
% sudo /sw/bin/ruby setup.rb setup
% sudo /sw/bin/ruby setup.rb install