Introduction

After spending several days of scouring the Internet and Ruby related message boards looking for a pre-compiled AIX binary of this wonderful language I finally gave up and compiled it myself. I borrowed from several posts about CPPFLAGS to set my environment right, including lines in source files to comment out, and finally trial-and-error with dependencies to generate a working, fully functional Ruby (albeit, no TK support at the moment, but completely functional with Ruby Gems and Ruby on Rails).

This document describes the software, steps, and modification to the Ruby source distribution to build a fully functional Ruby 1.8.4 on AIX 4.3.3 and AIX 5L (5.1, 5.2, and 5.3). Ruby 1.8.5 compiles just fine by specifying just the paths to the various libraries.