This should apply to RHEL5 as well, but I haven’t verified yet.
The easiest solution I’ve found is to simply install Ruby and it’s dependencies and then install RubyGems from source.
I’ve written a small script which installs Ruby and it’s dependencies. It then grabs the RubyGems source tarball and installs Gems from source. As I wrote this to get a working Chef install, it also adds an opscode gems source.
You can get the script here.
I prefer to use the EPEL repository (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL). It contains a lot of useful software, including RubyGems.
I usually prefer an existing repository as well. Unfortunately, I’m not allowed to add any non-official Red Hat repositories to the production servers at work. The method I presented uses the official Ruby packages from Red Hat and just downloads the Ruby Gem sources.
Nice, works like a charm.. thx