I bought a Sharp Zaurus a week ago and soon discovered that people had
put together Perl and Python packages for this great little gadget. Why not
Ruby? I thought.
So I set about creating one. At first, I just dissected some binary packages
from the Debian ARM distribution, deleted all the fluff, and then copied what
was left over to my SD card. A few symlinks later, everything was running as
expected.
Then, Vincent Fiack posted a script that he had put together to pull the
latest version of Ruby from CVS, cross-compile that for the ARM architecture,
and package it up. I made some minor adjustments to the build configuration
section of the script to reflect that I would be installing onto the SD card
rather than into RAM, and then set about the build process.
The resulting archive of Ruby presented here is a CVS snapshot of Ruby 1.7.3,
taken on 4th August 2002. The Ruby binary is statically linked, to
ease the installation somewhat.
Here we verify that the binary runs at all:
This version of Ruby expects to find its library files in
/mnt/card/ruby:
For this reason, the version contained in this archive is only really suitable
for installation onto an SD card, as the Zaurus mounts this on
/mnt/card. cd into this directory and unpack the file:
tar xzvf ruby-zaurus-1.7.3-20020927.tar.gz
The Ruby binary and irb will install into /mnt/card/ruby/bin,
so you should either create symlinks to this directory, move the binaries to
somewhere in your $PATH or add this directory to your $PATH.
I've done minimal testing of this version, but it seems to work the way it
should. Your mileage may vary.
Download Ruby for the Sharp Zaurus.
Overview and Introduction
# uname -a
Linux localhost 2.4.6-rmk1-np2-embedix #1 Tue Jul 30 08:38:25 PDT 2002 armv4l unknown
# ruby -v
ruby 1.7.3 (2002-09-27) [arm-linux]
# ruby -e 'puts $:'
/mnt/card/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.7
/mnt/card/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.7/arm-linux
/mnt/card/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby
/mnt/card/ruby/lib/ruby/1.7
/mnt/card/ruby/lib/ruby/1.7/arm-linux
.