The question has been coming up quite a bit in non-forum places lately so I thought I'd just put this here. Anyone looking to install ruby should probably invest a little time in using the ruby version management system. It's actually far easier to get the most up to date versions of ruby deployed. It manages your various sets of gems and lets you set a default interpreter with ease. It takes care of all of the installation process too. For example, to get the latest version of the interpreter you just do "rvm install ruby-head" and after a few moments of installing, you're ready to go. It's relatively easy to install 1.8 on machines right now from packages, but it's considerably more difficult to get the latest versions of 1.9 and 1.8 side by side. This makes the process a breeze.
Hey thanks! I just fumbled about yesterday/this morning with realizing Debian's native version is 1.8.x and I wanted to try 1.9.1. Removed all the 1.8 branch and had to make some symlinks for my 1.9; I'll go check this out!
If you're using Rails I would suggest installing Ruby 1.9.2 instead of 1.9.1 due to Rails 3.0 (beta) having issues. It'll save you the hassle of debugging down the road.
Here's the site:
http://rvm.beginrescueend.com/rubies/rub...
I used the git installation process. (The first on the list.)