installing curb on ubuntu 8.1

i switched over from Net::HTTP to the curb gem (curl bindings for ruby) so i could take advantage of the performance gains (TBD) and that it keeps connections open by default.

on my local os x machine, i just ran:

sudo gem install curb

and everything worked fine. however, when deploying to our dev ubuntu box, it was not as smooth a process. when running gem install, i got the following error.

Building native extensions. This could take a while...

ERROR: Error installing curb:

ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

/usr/bin/ruby1.8 extconf.rb install curb

"-fno-strict-aliasing -g -g -O2 -fPIC $(cflags)"

checking for curl-config... no

checking for main() in -lcurl... no

*** extconf.rb failed ***

Could not create Makefile due to some reason, probably lack of

necessary libraries and/or headers. Check the mkmf.log file for more

details. You may need configuration options.

Provided configuration options:

--with-opt-dir

--without-opt-dir

--with-opt-include

--without-opt-include=${opt-dir}/include

--with-opt-lib

--without-opt-lib=${opt-dir}/lib

--with-make-prog

--without-make-prog

--srcdir=.

--curdir

--ruby=/usr/bin/ruby1.8

--with-curl-dir

--without-curl-dir

--with-curl-include

--without-curl-include=${curl-dir}/include

--with-curl-lib

--without-curl-lib=${curl-dir}/lib

--with-curllib

--without-curllib

extconf.rb:19: Can't find libcurl or curl/curl.h (RuntimeError)

Try passing --with-curl-dir or --with-curl-lib and --with-curl-include

options to extconf.

Gem files will remain installed in /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/curb-0.6.0.0 for inspection.

Results logged to /var/lib/gems/1.8/gems/curb-0.6.0.0/ext/gem_make.out

after some googling, i determined that i probably needed the libcurl4-openssl-dev package, so i ran the following:

sudo apt-get install libcurl4-openssl-dev

that resulted in:

Reading package lists... Done

Building dependency tree

Reading state information... Done

The following extra packages will be installed:

libidn11-dev libldap-2.4-2 libldap2-dev pkg-config

Suggested packages:

libcurl3-dbg

The following NEW packages will be installed:

libcurl4-openssl-dev libidn11-dev libldap2-dev pkg-config

The following packages will be upgraded:

libldap-2.4-2

1 upgraded, 4 newly installed, 0 to remove and 25 not upgraded.

Need to get 1115kB/2678kB of archives.

After this operation, 7115kB of additional disk space will be used.

Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y

Err http://archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/main libldap-2.4-2 2.4.11-0ubuntu6.1

404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.30 80]

Err http://archive.ubuntu.com intrepid-updates/main libldap2-dev 2.4.11-0ubuntu6.1

404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.30 80]

Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openldap/libldap-2.4-2_2.4.11-0ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.30 80]

Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/o/openldap/libldap2-dev_2.4.11-0ubuntu6.1_amd64.deb 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.30 80]

E: Unable to fetch some archives, maybe run apt-get update or try with --fix-missing?

as it turned out, my sources were out of date and when apt-get went looking for the libldap2 packages it needed, they were not there. so i ran:

sudo apt-get update

it updated my sources and i was able to install the libcurl4-openssl-dev package and succesfully install the curb gem. maybe that will help somebody out there.