Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

How difficult can it be?

I’m now on the fourth machine….two windows boxes failed to install the Ruby mysql connector (admittedly one of those was cygwin, therefore not really expected to work), the linux box wouldn’t even get as far as Ruby (as an aside, I’ve managed to mangle my apt-get to a point where it refuses to do anything except complain about netbase being both needed and not needed…clues? Do I just need to keep beheading open source developers until one of them admits to causing this kind of madness?), and now I’m halfway through the install on the Mini, its looking alright so far which means it must be time for bed before I spend all night trying to make the damned software work.

I’ve not even started anything complicated yet.


Categories: Memories.

/ 10 Comments

10 comments

    • neilh

      Finally got OSX version working….gotta keep remembering to use the Ruby I installed, the one that comes with 10.3 is broken (I thought I’d symlinked it to the right one but it seems to revert when I reboot).

      Reply
  2. neilh

    The way I get into them is that I hit a problem at 1 in the morning decide to give up and go to sleep. Then don’t come back to fix it for three weeks because I’ve got a full time job doing something less useful. When I do come back to it someone somewhere has fixed one of the things that I found was broken, but becuase I’ve got the broken one in a state of half install it won’t install the rest of it because its different to the one thats now on the net, and it won’t uninstall becuase that was what I was failing to do in the first place.

    Repeat this cycle for a few months and its a surprise the damned thing still boots.

    The support fora say ‘use -f’ to force it, but that just says that it failed more emphatically. I even tried using two ‘-f’s but that didn’t help.

    Reply
  3. neilh

    Goddammit, I’m feeling a bit useless now.

    I’m going to have to pull out as well, partly not so interesting without a copilot and partly similar kind of work pressure. I *love* the concept and will be keen to keep up with how things go and be involved next time around.

    Reply
  4. neilh

    Thankfully I have a practically infinite collection of machines here to keep trying until I find one that works. Its just a question of knowing when to move on to the next one.

    Reply
    • neilh

      Oh, I’ve no fear of asking for help if thats going to solve my problem.

      In this case what I had was a broken apt-get setup, which meant that it refused to install or uninstall anything to do with networking, so on your list of instructions I’d failed at the first hurdle with an error message that told me to try something that didn’t work, and all the forums I could find suggested exactly the same fix.

      Thats a virtual machine so its not the end of the world to delete it and start again but I’ve got better things to do with my life than install Linux a hundred times.

      Fortunately the mini has come to the rescue and dug me out of a hole I made for myself, albeit with two versions of Ruby on it, one broken and one fixed, so as long as I remember to use the right one I’m ok.

      Rails looks easy (he says, setting himself up for looking stupid later when he can’t make it do something trivial).

      Reply

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