Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 for Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper 20 Mar 08

We’ve backported some packages useful for Ruby on Rails deployment to the long term support Ubuntu Dapper distro.  They’ve been available for a while but it only just ocurred to us this might be useful to others!

Dapper has Ruby 1.8.4 (though labelled as 1.8.2 in the package list) and ImageMagick 6.2.  Ruby 1.8.4 has some known problems that are fixed in 1.8.6 and the rmagick gem recently updated to version 2, reportedly fixing the memory leaks, but it requires ImageMagick 6.3.

We backported Ruby 1.8.6 p111 and ImageMagick 6.3 from the latest development version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron) to Dapper.  They’ve been in use on a few boxes and no problems so far.  Feel free to make use of them.  We’ll be backporting any security updates as they come.

General details of the repository are here, with specific information about Ruby 1.8.6 and ImageMagick 6.3 on their own pages.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron is due out in the next few month, which brings a lot of this stuff with it.  Some of you might have the luxury of being able to upgrade to it, but some may need to stick with Dapper for a while – hopefully these packages will help you out.