To get Red Hat Linux on Rails, you need the following:

• zlib-devel – RPM

• Ruby 1.8.5

• Ruby Gems

Installing Ruby

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
tar xvzf ruby-1.8.6.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make test
su
make install

Note: tarball names have changed over time, so most recent working wget command was:

wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/ruby-1.8.6-p111.tar.gz

Further note that these commands work to install on RHEL:

su -l
# whatever you do to log in as a sudoer
cd ruby-1.8.6-p111
./configure
make
make install
logout

Installing RubyGems

cd
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/20989/rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
tar zxf rubygems-0.9.4.tgz
cd rubygems-0.9.4
ruby setup.rb

Installing Rails

gem update
gem install rails --include-dependencies 

Now you’re on Rails

.. But see MySQL 3 and Rails. Red Hat 9 came with MySQL 3.