All I wanted to do was sit down with Mike Hartl’s “Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial” yesterday. Hours later, with nothing to show other than a zillion open terminals, I punted and watched the Flyers beat the Sabres despite playing like girls (I know, unfair to girls!). Then I went to bed.

So I must have had a dorked up installation of RVM or something, because when I tried to install Ruby 1.9.2 and Rails 3 and upgrade RVM I ran into <ahem> “issues.” I was getting weird errors like:

error installing rails i18n requires rubygems version 1.3.5
gem_runner.rb:85:in `<top (required)>': undefined method `load_plugins'

After exploring all sorts of similar woes that other people had and not really getting that magic googullet (Google Bullet), I decided to go all nuclear (apologies to Japanese readers). I was able to run:

rvm implode

Which made “rvm -v” fail to find rvm — a good thing. It meant I had uninstalled RVM. (Or so I thought!)

I also deleted the RVM stuff from the bash_profile file(s). Just to attempt to eliminate voodoo dolls.

But I still ran into stupid errors (stupid voodoo dolls!):

error installing RVM fatal: Not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

After much pain and suffering (well, only in a wimpy software relative sense), my guess is that I installed rvm as sudo at one point or installed the gem, or somehow had things “cross-eyed.” I don’t know…

I guess I should be more diligent, because in general you get spoiled by Ruby and gems and Rails and the general euphoria of how easy things are. Until they aren’t.

Today, I ended up fixing my system by looking for “rvm” on my system, and cleaning up leftovers. The crumbs from my sloppy eating at the trough of Ruby, I suppose.

I saw some directories holding rvm docs. I whacked them.

I saw some directories with rvm source, archives… Gone.

I uninstalled the rvm gem. (Oops. Who put that there?)

Finally, I retried the install:

jonsmac$ bash < <(curl -s https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/install/rvm)

And added this to ~/.bash_profile And I restarted terminal because I always forget how to do that source ~/.bash_profile thing…

jonsmac2-2:~ jon$ rvm -v
rvm 1.6.2 by Wayne E. Seguin (wayneeseguin@gmail.com) [https://rvm.beginrescueend.com/]

Shazam! No errors. Thanks Wayne!

Now I can get past page 15 in Mike’s tutorial book!