Installing RubyMine 4 on Ubuntu 12.04

I recently set up a new Ubuntu 12.04 machine in a VirtualBox VM. After installing the basic RVM, Rails, and Ruby stuff, I was then ready to install RubyMine. (By the way, see this post where I explain how to setup the Rails goodness on a new Ubuntu 12.04 machine: http://mattslay.com/installing-rails-on-ubuntu-12-04-with-rvm-support/ )

Installing RubyMine

There is no actual “installer” for RubyMine on Linux. You just extract it to a folder of your choice. (I put mine in /home/matt/apps/RunyMine-4.0.3/). If you try to place it in one of the more locked-down system folder, you could run into permissions problems, which always drives me nuts. So I just create and “apps” folder in my Home folder, and drop all my non-Ubuntu-Software-Center packages in separate folders there.

You can read the RubyMine Installation Instructions in the file named “Install-Linux-tar.txt” file which is located in the archive file for RubyMine that you will download from JetBrains. (http://www.jetbrains.com/ruby/download/).  It will tell you where to unzip the files, and how to launch RubyMine after you’ve extracted it from the archive. (Note to Windows users… All this talk about “tar” and “archive” is basically what us Windows folks call a “zip” file.) After you download the archive from the JetBrains site, right click on it and open it with the Archive Manager. From there you can extract it to a folder of your choice. After that, it’s ready to run RubyMine (well, after you follow the next step…)

Sun Java JDK

RubyMine requires the Sun Java JDK environment to make its fancy GUI stuff work (note: RubyMine does not work well with OpenJDK, so don’t use this one by mistake!). Unfortunately, the Ubuntu Software Center does not have a click-easy installer for this, so you’ve got to do it in a terminal window, but trust me, it’s not hard. I followed this guide (from a Question/Answer on StackOverflow) to install the Sun Java JDK 1.7.0 in my new Ubuntu machine:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10178601/rubymine-on-linux

Note: This step can be done before or after you extract RubyMine from the .tar download. It’s just that RubyMine will give you an error if you try to run it without having the Sun Java JDK installed.

Done!

With Rails and Ruby installed (see link at the top of this page) and RubyMine extracted, and Sun Java JDK installed, you are ready to ride on the Rails train.

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