scRUBYt! is a simple to learn and use, yet powerful web scraping toolkit written in Ruby. The idea behind making scRUBYt! was to show a few simple concepts of Web extraction as a practical extension of this tutorial.
I am using Ubuntu from warthy warthog and since I installed it for the first time, it’s my distro of choice. I could fill a whole blog with posts on why I like Ubuntu - however, a post about painless installation of different development tools won’t be one of my topics there. As much as I like Ubuntu, I have to admit that it is definitely not a distribution geared towards development. I remember when trying rails for the first time, I had to compile something and it took 2 days to find out that Breezy does not have make by default!
OK, this is not a blog post about development woes on Ubuntu in general - I would like to restrict myself to the problems which are scRUBYt! related. Thanks to the guys who reported these problems btw. (Dboy, Jason Evans, Richard Musiol - sorry if I left out someone).
The problem nearly always manifested in the message:
uninitialized constant Scrubyt::Extractor (NameError)
So far, there were 2 solutions that helped: one was to install rdoc and ri - since installing Ruby does not automatically install these packages. The other problem is Mechanize related: it is needed to install libopenssl-ruby.
If you find any other problems, please report it here (add it as a comment and I will update the post). Thanks! Happy scrubbing!
February 17th, 2007 at 9:24 am
You may want to try Mepis. Based on Ubuntu but with a KDE desktop - no it isn’t just Kubuntu- its a very sucessful and capable distro in its own right. Well worth it.
February 17th, 2007 at 11:47 pm
Doug,
Is it easy to install everything needed for Ruby (and Rails) easily on Mepis? e.g. on gentoo, all you have to do is:
on ubuntu… well it’s much harder and you can never be sure something is not missing.
I have an NVidia graphic card which Ubuntu really does not like… so I have reconfigured xorg for maybe 5 times in the past 2 months which is kind of annoying…
Do you think so these problems are gone in Mephis? Then I would even give it a try…
However this would solve the problem only for me: I think most of the guys will use on ubuntu happily, so at least if I have ubuntu I can partially catch the problems other might have…
March 11th, 2007 at 9:49 pm
Also good to note is that in order to install openssl-ruby, you have to “tell ruby how to compile the openssl extension”:http://www.jessirae.com/blog/articles/2007/03/11/installing-openssl-on-ubuntu. I don’t know if this is particular to Ubuntu, but I had to do it on my Ubunutu machine.