I am trying to install rackamole on Windows XP:
S:\development\DevKit>gem install rackamole
Temporarily enhancing PATH to include DevKit...
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: While executing gem ... (Errno::EACCES)
Permission denied - S:/development/Ruby/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rackamole-0.4.0/...
I have checked permission:
S:\development\DevKit>notepad S:\development\Ruby\lib\ruby\gems\1.9.1\gems\rackamole-0.4.0\some.txt
and didn’t have any problem.
How can I install gem?
Installing C-extensions on Windows has always been a big and painful problem, as Windows doesn’t ship with a compiler. Most gems which are intended to be used on Windows systems publish a specialized gem version with a specific platform field, which then would include pre-compiled binaries. This is not the case for rackamole, otherwise it would be visible here.
Another solution would be to use a version of the gem which uses the newer FFI approach instead of C-extensions to interface with native libraries. I guess this isn’t an option here because rackamole, whatever that is, is probably only available with C-extensions.
There once was a Ruby distribution including its own compiler and development headers, but I can’t remember the name and I don’t know if its still maintained.
Should using Windows not be mandatory, I recommend using a more developer-friendly OS like Ubuntu or Debian in combination with rvm.