Installing ruby gems fails when attempting to build native

Question

So I decided that I was going to give Ruby (first 1.9.1, then 1.8.7) a try and I wanted to get the basic tools installed before I attempted to do too much.

I have begun to install some gems, and I have run into some issues when I attempt to install one which builds native code on windows 7.

I was attempting to install the ruby debugger and linecache and each time I get the following make error: make: *** No rule to make target %RUBY_HOME%/include/ruby-1.9.1/ruby.h', needed by trace_nums.o'.

My google-fu has not turned up anything very useful, so I am asking for the SO community to point me in the right direction. When I go used Ruby 1.8.7, i only attempted to install ruby-debug and linecache. When I was using 1.9.1, I attempted to use ruby-debug19 and linecache19. Since the issue is the same for both versions, I assume that it is something wrong on my end, but I do not know where to start.

Answer 1

For some reason, I needed to run the gem install from a Unix shell emulator from the devkit.

I don't know why it worked out the way it did, but this how I fixed the problem.