Shortly after I posted my last blog entry on installing RM-Install, I received a comment from an employee at FiveRuns encouraging me to contact their support team.  We had a few brief emails back and forth and in the end I was told “You need 32-bit compatibility binaries to use our product on 64-bit linux.”  I was confident that was the issue from the start as the error was specifically nagging about “ELFCLASS32″.

I honestly didn’t take the time to go and find out how to install 32-bit compatibility binaries. And of course I expect you, Dear Reader, to understand why.  I’m a developer and therefore I’m lazy.  If I can add a few lines to a shell script that will install the software I want, that’s an easy and known quantity.  It will probably take me a few minutes to write the script and a few more to run the script.

To install the 32-bit binaries, use the following command:

sudo apt-get install ia32-libs

So what do I really think of the RM-Install product?  It’s a good idea if you’re running on a 32-bit distro and need a Rails development environment quickly.  I’m sure there are many developers not using dual core 64-bit processors these days, I just don’t know any.   This is really more on par to what Instant Rails is for the Windows guys for a complete environment than the BitNami product is this time.

Congrats to FiveRuns for making it easier to start coding in Rails.