"permission deinied" when installing Rails on OS/X

rubyonrails-talk
1

When I do a

  gem install -r rails --include-dependencies

it works fine on Linux, but when I do it from a OS/X bash shell, I get the error message

  Permission denied - /usr/local/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/cache/ activesupport-1.4.4.gem

The error is reproducible. What could be the problem?

Ronald

2

dear sir

you have to use sudo when installing gems.

3

put the word “sudo” before the word “gem” and it will ask for your password and should then work fine.

4

You probably should use sudo. sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies

5

I see!

But there is one strange thing: When I enter the password of my Mac OS administrator account, it is rejected by sudo! First I thought I used the wrong password, but no: I can reproducibly switch to my Mac Administrator account using this password, but when I supply it to 'sudo', it is not accepted.

It looks to me like a "mismatch of account names": When I list /etc/ passwd from my bash shell, I get (of course) the user "root" as administrator. From the Mac viewpoint, I have no user named "root", but I have an user with name "Administrator" having administrator privileges (and of this, I know the password of course). However I can not remember having ever created a separate password for the root user in the "Unix compatibility box".

Any idea how I could resolve this?

Ronald

6

I was able to narrow the problem further:

First, I found that I can not do a switch user to root (because of rejecting the password, as explained in my previous posting), but I can do, for example, a

  su admin

and this account corresponds to my Mac OS/X administrator account. So I tried first

  gem install -r rails --include-dependencies

from the admin account - but now I get the error message

  Could not find rails (> 0) in any repository

This puzzles me, because on Linux, the same works fine. Note that I usually get this error message only when I forget the '-r' option in the gem install command.

A side remark regarding the suggestion of using "sudo" for the install: I found that even though I can do a "su admin", when I do a

  sudo -u admin ....

the same password which was happily accepted by "su", is now rejected.