Tag: Raspberry

Getting Started with Ruby and rbenv on a Raspberry Pi

Note To Self Ruby Tools for Testing Uncategorized No Comments

In preparation of a workshop at Agile Testing Days 2022, I’m setting up a Raspberry Pi as a backup system for participants, to be prepared if things go wrong. Especially one of the first steps “Installing Ruby – If Necessary” has the potential to fail or take too long.

With the keyboard configured (see the previous post “Setting Up a Raspberry PI with a German Mac Keyboard“), the next step is installing a recent Ruby version. I’ll use rbenv , a widespread tool to manage Ruby versions on a machine.

Installing rbenv

The rbenv page suggests to install the tool using a basic git checkout.

~ $ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/rbenv.git ~/.rbenv
Cloning into '/home/guest/.rbenv'...
remote: Enumerating objects: 3138, done.
remote: Counting objects: 100% (288/288), done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (147/147), done.
remote: Total 3138 (delta 165), reused 231 (delta 131), pack-reused 2850
Receiving objects: 100% (3138/3138), 626.69 KiB | 3.12 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (1955/1955), done.

Following the next step in the docs, .bashrc is updated to initialise rbenv:

~ $ echo 'eval "$(~/.rbenv/bin/rbenv init - bash)"' >> ~/.bashrc

Restarting the terminal app actually loads the updated .bashrc, and then rbenv is installed and configured.

Another step is to also install the ruby-build plugin, which rbenv uses to compile and install new Ruby versions. I’ll use git to clone this plugin and upgrade it (as documented in https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build#readme):

~ $ git clone https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build.git "$(rbenv root)"/plugins/ruby-build

Now, rbenv can be used to install Rubyies:

~ $ time rbenv install 3.1.2
To follow progress, use 'tail -f /tmp/ruby-build.20221110172124.19039.log' or pass --verbose
No system openssl version was found, ensure openssl headers are installed (https://github.com/rbenv/ruby-build/wiki#suggested-build-environment)
Downloading openssl-3.0.7.tar.gz...
︙

As a last step set this new Ruby version to be used globally:

rbenv global 3.1.2

That’s it. Ruby 3.1.2 is now available for the user an the Raspberry Pi.

Setting Up a Raspberry PI with a German Mac Keyboard

Note To Self 1 Comment

This is another “Note to self” post.

For a workshop I will present at the Agile Testing Days 2022, I’ve set up a backup computer, in case folks don’t have Ruby installed on their machine already, or don’t get it installed within the available time slot.

The Raspberry itself had already worked … with some keyboard back in 2017 (when I used it in a ½ days tutorial at the same conference). But now, I connected a Mac keyboard to it, one with a German layout – including the umlauts. Getting the configuration to work well enough was surprisingly hard.

The existing keyboard configuration didn’t work very well, since it expected an international layout, meaning that the key cap labels weren’t always correct. Or the printed key wasn’t, depending on your perspective.

Setting it up using the GUI application that comes with RaspbianOS didn’t work so well either: for some configuration settings the keyboard stopped reacting completely. Yay! I learned another way how not do do it. 🤣

In the end I used the terminal raspi-config:

sudo raspi-config
A screenshot of the 'raspi-config' tool as displayed in a terminal window

to try all variations of (non-japanese) Apple keyboards with the corresponding German layouts and variants.

In the end I settled with this configuration, as it is stored in /etc/default/keyboard on the Raspi:

# KEYBOARD CONFIGURATION FILE

# Consult the keyboard(5) manual page.

XKBMODEL=apple
XKBLAYOUT="de"
XKBVARIANT=
XKBOPTIONS="lv3:ralt_switch,terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp"

BACKSPACE="guess"

© 2012-2023 Stephan Kämper — Mastodon

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