I decided to try out Rackspace Cloud for a new worker server that Am I Down needed. Since I wanted to keep the system tight on memory usage, I decided to go with Ruby Enterprise Edition. Unfortunately, I ran into a snag getting it installed via RVM (the terrific tool for running multiple versions of Ruby).

I kept getting this error after running “rvm install ree”:

Error running './installer -a /home/username/.rvm/rubies/ree-1.8.7-2010.01 --dont-install-useful-gems ', please check /home/username/.rvm/log/ree-1.8.7-2010.01/install*.log

There has been an error while trying to run the ree installer. Aborting the installation.

I couldn’t find anything on how to fix this as I poked around Google. Since I use zsh (via the amazing Oh My Zsh project), I figured that had to be conflicting with it. I did resolve one issue caused by the old version of zsh installed via “sudo aptitude install zsh” by compiling zsh from source (a newer version).

The Solution: Install Readline headers

But…back to the issue at hand. The solution became clear when I tried to install REE from source. The REE installer complained about missing “GNU Readline development headers”. Running the installation for readline fixed it.

sudo aptitude install libreadline5-dev

From there, RVM installed REE no problem.

Update (3/5/2010): Wayne, the author of RVM kindly wrote to me on Twitter within hours of this post to see if there was something working improperly with RVM. It turns out that I missed a clear set of instructions that indicated the need to install readline5 when using REE. Thanks Wayne!