RoR and windows98

[Mittineague]

I'm pretty stubborn persistant at times. I've been trying to get Ruby/Rails working on my Windows98 (I know, I know) OS.
InstantRails seems to work OK in that going to 127.0.0.1:3001 runs cookbook. But no fxri Interactive Ruby Help and irb Console (throws dll exception) and the Ruby Console only stays open for a fleeting moment.
I guess some of the problem may be cmd.exe vs. command.com
(also, the Apache log shows "exec() may not be safe" warnings)
Not the best situation for learning and development.
I have also tried a standalone Ruby/Gems/SciTE install with similar problems.

In any case, to get to the point, is anyone running Ruby/Rails on Windows98? It would encourage me to keep troubleshooting if I atleast knew that it is possible.

[Mittineague]

I feel like I'm the last Windows98 user ;(
Anyway, this may help someone.

I reinstalled the standalone Ruby/Gems/SciTE "one-click". This time the "go" in SciTE actually works.

And I was able to get the RubyGems Package Manager to work after changing

cmd /k "c:\ruby\bin\gem"

to

command /k "c:\ruby\bin\gem"

in the C:\ruby\bin\gemhelp.bat file.

[Mittineague]

Using the RubyGems Package Manager I was able to install sqlite3 successfully, after a long, long, long (literally hours) wait. What seemed like a hang at
"Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org", except for the CPU crunching going on, eventually completed (maybe the WEBrick server is slow?).

I was also able to install rails and it's dependencies. Almost as long were all the
"installing ri documentation"
and
"installing rdoc documentation"

I then did
gem update
Mistake. rubygems was updated and broke Gems giving a "gems_server deprecated use gems server" error. So, not being able to use the RubyGems Package Manager any longer, I was forced to uninstall and reinstall Ruby.

SciTE again didn't work. Uninstall and reinstall again, but with 2 differences.
At the "select components to install" Gems and SciTE are selected by default, I unchecked and rechecked them instead of just hitting "next".
And at the last "reboot now or boot later" I chose "later". SciTE now works.

I can get gems, irb, and sqlite prompts, and they work, but I'm still having trouble getting rails to create a directory. Even after commenting out the

<&#37;= '# ' if freeze %>RAILS_GEM_VERSION = '<%= Rails::VERSION::STRING %>' unless defined? RAILS_GEM_VERSION

line in config\environment.rb to avoid the unexpected < syntax error, it seems
ruby script/console
doesn't do what I want it to.

fxri still doesn't work either, but I guess I can do without that as long as I can get rails to work.

Progress, but aaarrrggghhhh!

[ParkinT]

You most certainly are stubborn persistant tenacious.
I tip my hat to your valiant effort.
Windows98 (still) is the most stable version of Windows OS and you are not (quite) the last one using it. I still have an old Win98 box running.

However, for Ruby and Rails I have installed Ubuntu on my laptop and simply run a WindowsXP virtual machine for anything that absolutely requires Windows.

[Mittineague]

Thanks for the Ubuntu suggestion ParkinT, although a very pleasant idea, unfortunately it requires 4GB to install and I don't have enough.

But it did make me think of trying Mongel instead of WEBrick. When I went to localhost, I got the "Welcome aboard You're riding Ruby on Rails!" page like I did with WEBrick. The "About your application's environment" gave an Internal Server Error, so I followed the link to rubyonrails.org and found what I needed (installing Windows 9x).

It seems Windows doesn't like .cmd files, so I copied some in the bin folder and gave them the .bat extension.
update_rubygems.bat
rails.bat
gpgen.bat
mongrel_rails.bat

Windows 9x doesn't deal with &#37;* so I REMed the original line and used it with %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9 instead of the %* wildcard

REM @ruby "C:/RUBY/bin/rails" %*
@ruby "C:/RUBY/bin/rails" %1 %2 %3 %4 %5 %6 %7 %8 %9

Then I edited the autoexec.bat file adding
SET HOME=C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\

And all is well (so far), a beautiful thing.

Using C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\ for HOME seems wrong, even though it "works".
Especially since
ruby script/generate
shows
......
2. Unzip to directory C:\WINDOWS\DESKTOP\/.rails/generators/login
.....
but I'm a happy camper for the time being.