Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

I finally finished migrating everything over from my old desktop to my new iMac. (I’m still amazed that a consumer-level Mac is more than twice as fast as my old high-end desktop… such is the pace of hardware, of course.)

At any rate, when I started working on one of my Rails projects, I was surprised to see that performance was really poor– much slower that on the old box. Then I realized that my Ruby and Rails installations probably got migrated by Migration Assistant.

Sure enough, ruby -v in Terminal revealed Ruby 1.8.6 for PowerPC/Darwin. This means that Ruby is running in PPC emulation, which explains the performance I was seeing.

Since Leopard ships with Ruby, this means that I now have two versions: in /usr/bin/ruby there’s the version that came with the OS, which is

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-06-07 patchlevel 36) [universal-darwin9.0]

In /usr/local/bin/ruby there’s:

ruby 1.8.6 (2007-03-13 patchlevel 0) [powerpc-darwin8.10.0].

This is obviously a problem…

Some Google time later, I came across this post on Punctuated Productivity; that set me in the right direction for uninstalling the old version and getting the new one up to snuff. His approach was to completely wipe /usr/local/bin and /opt/, which I found a little scary. Here’s a slightly more surgical approach.

1. Remove the following from /usr/local/bin (sudo, of course):
   

   gem*
update_rubygems
rails
rake
mongrel-rails
cap
capify
gpgen
index_gem_repository.rb
libpng-config

2. Unfortunately, I had just installed and configured ImageMagick on the old box, which is a long and tricky process that I’ll have to do all over again. But since it was the only thing that I had installed on that day, so I was able to open ./ to open /usr/local/bin in the Finder, sort by date, and select/delete all of the ImageMagick and RMagick files in a couple of clicks:

   Magick-config
Wand-config
animate
compare
composite
conjure
convert
display
freetype-config
identify
import
libpng12-config
libwmf-config
libwmf-fontmap
mogrify
montage
pkg-config
stream
wmf2eps
wmf2fig
wmf2gd
wmf2svg
wmf2x
libpng-config

3. My last uninstall step was to delete /opt after all, because only MacPorts (which I used to install ImageMagick) had put anything in there.

Now hash -r followed by which ruby correctly reveals /usr/bin/ruby, and ruby -v reports ruby 1.8.6 (2007-06-07 patchlevel 36) [universal-darwin9.0]

Now to reinstall Rails:

sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

Next I have to reinstall ImageMagick and RMagick, which will hopefully be less painful this time around now that I know about MacPorts…




This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Ruby on Rails. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.