Building Ruby on Linux for the forgetful

Compiling Ruby can be fraught with peril, especially if your distro is stuck in the stone ages (i.e. shipping 1.8.7).

After some false starts and bad advice I found on the internet, this is what worked for me. I'm really just putting this here so I'll know where to look the next time I need to compile Ruby.

$ autoconf
# Forces compiler to load system libraries.
# Right now that's libyaml
$ ./configure --with-opt-dir=/usr/lib64
$ make
$ make test
$ sudo make install