CIS700 Wiki | Main / FreeRIDE

FreeRIDE is a standalone Ruby IDE, better in some ways than the RDT plugin Eclipse, worse in others. I suggest you try both and use whichever you like better.

You can get FreeRIDE from http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl. There are installers for Windows and for Linux, but not yet for Macintosh.

To install on Mac OS X, probably the best approach is to install DarwinPorts, http://darwinports.org/getdp/, then go to http://freeride.rubyforge.org/wiki/wiki.pl?MacOS for the command to get and install FreeRIDE. I haven't yet done this--if you have, please comment.

Possible FreeRIDE problems

When you run FreeRIDE, if it begins by opening a DOS window containing the command

    freeruby-win\bin\ruby.exe -rubygems freeride.rb

then you may have a problem. Try running a program consisting of the single command

    puts "Hello"

If this produces output, you're fine. Otherwise, you will have to run FreeRIDE by opening a DOS window and typing

    ruby freeride.rb

The same one-line program as given above should produce output in the FreeRIDE window.
This worked for me on one Windows maching, but not on another.

The FreeRIDE installer apparently doesn't give you command-line access to ruby and irb; but you can run irb from within FreeRIDE.