Post-Migration Ruby Leopard Blues
Posted February 3rd, 2008 in Apple, Development, Ruby on Rails | Permanent LinkI 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.
- 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 - 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 - 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…