How to install the MySQL Ruby Gem on Ubuntu 9.10?

Thanks to this thread I found out that the reason it fails to install is because of

... a path pointing the wrong way when the package was compiled.

Thankfully the solution is very simple:

sudo gem uninstall mysql
sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev -y
sudo gem install mysql 

Note: I got an error message trying to uninstall mysql, but that's okay because it wasn't installed in the first place. While installing the mysql gem, I got messages that looked like errors: No definition for next_result, but those aren't errors. This happens when installing the documentation. They are just messages saying that there isn't any documentation available for certain functions.

You do not really need that gem to use MySQL in Ruby. There is a package in Debian/Ubuntu that already has same code already compiled and prepared. Just type sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby.

On Ubuntu Hardy, 8.04 I got the apt-get install to work with:

sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev -y