Installing Gems on Tiger

For my apprenticeship at 8th Light, I decided to make some use of my very first laptop: an iBook G4. I know what you're thinking—sweet choice, right? It's the perfect blend of everything you don't want in a laptop—not quite vintage enough to be cool, yet not quite modern enough to be functional. Yep, it's running Mac OS 10.4 Tiger, and no, its processor and internal storage isn't good enough to handle 10.5. This means that I'm stuck installing legacy software and I can only use it for very basic tasks, like checking email and running text editors.

Anyway, here's what I had to go through to install rspec and Rails on my little machine.

I'll add links to all of this stuff someday, so that the poor unfortunate souls out there who are still running Tiger will at least have a shot at installing Rails.

1. Get XCode
1. With 10.4 Tiger, you need a legacy version of XCode 2.5.
2. This means that you need to sign up for an Apple Developer acccount. If you sign up under Safari, it's free.
3. It's really difficult to find XCode 2.5. Go to the Apple Developer Downloads Page (you'll need to sign in), and then click back a couple of pages.
2. Once you have XCode, you should be able to install MacPorts. 
1. This can take awhile. You need version 2.0.3
3. Once you have MacPorts, you can install Git. 
1. This took me about 5 or 6 hours to download and compile. Since I was working with a relatively fresh install of 10.4 and didn't have any of the other resources installed on my machine, it took a long time to catch up with all of the necessary files. (such as Python, GCC, etc)
4. Then you will need to update your version of Ruby to 1.8.7
1. Check your ruby version with ruby -v
2. The version that came preinstalled with the 10.4 OS on my machine was 1.8
3. I had to update twice: once to 1.8.2 and then to 1.8.7
4. I don't know if 1.9.3 works on 10.4
5. Finally, you can install gems 1.3.7. Make sure you get the right version!
6. Then you can install RSpec and Rails!