no such file to load — readline

Question

I am getting the following error:

$script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.2.2)
/opt/ruby-enterprise-1.8.6-20080709/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/completi         


        

Answer 1

The readline module is normally part of the Ruby package itself.

Did you manually build your Ruby install? If so, you want to make sure libreadline and its headers are installed, and build again.

On Debian/Ubuntu:

apt-get install libreadline-dev

Or on RHEL/CentOS, try

yum install readline-devel

Update:

You are using a very old release of Ubuntu. If you want to keep using it, open /etc/apt/sources.list in a text editor, and change all occurrences of archive.ubuntu.com to old-releases.ubuntu.com. Then, run apt-get update and try the above again.

I urge you to consider updating your installation, though. Ubuntu 7.10 hasn't seen security updates in quite a while, and using it in production is not recommended. Even if it's not a production machine, there's a good chance you'll run into further problems because of old versions of certain libraries/dependencies.