In response to Friday's news story that Ruby on Rails 2.0 had been released, I decided that it was time to update my installation. I opened a C-Shell on the Windows box I use for Rails development, typed "gem update", and promptly ran into trouble. I'm not sure why, but some of the updates failed. Maybe it's because the different packages that make up Rails all list each other as dependencies. I tried again with I decided to start fresh, so I downloaded the latest version of the Ruby One-Click Installer from RubyForge, uninstalled my old Ruby version (1.8.5, which should have been good enough for Rails 2.0), and installed the new version, 1.8.6. I opened a C-Shell, typed “gem install rails –include-dependencies”, and was told that no “gem” application was found.Gems was part of the One-Click Installer, but I downloaded the latest Ruby Gems package from RubyForge anyway, unpacked it, and ran setup.rb. It removed the version that was part of the One-Click Installer, which was one revision back, and installed itself.I opened a C-Shell, scrolled up to “gem install rails –include-dependencies”, and was again told that no “gem” application was found. I tried the All Programs|Ruby-186-26|RubyGems|RubyGems Package Manager menu item, and got the Gems quick help, so Gems was there. I tried “gem install rails –include-dependencies” yet again, and yet again was told it wasn’t there. By this point I was starting to suspect a path issue, so I tried “c:rubybingem” instead of “gem”. This started to run, but failed to perform the installation. I opened My Computer|Properties, went to the Advanced tab, opened the Environment Variables box, and checked the two Path variables. As I suspected by that time, Ruby wasn’t there: the uninstall had removed it, and the reinstall had not added it back. I added “;c:rubybin” to the end of my User path, closed the dialog, and once again opened a C-Shell. Finally Rails installed properly, at version 2.0.1. While I was thinking about it, I also installed the Rake Gem.Nothing is ever easy. Software Development