here you will find just quick-and-dirty hints how to use Ruby on Rails on Debian GNU/Linux platform

ruby and RoR installation

# apt-get install ruby

install ruby gems [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RubyGems]
# apt-get install rubygems

then don’t use ‘rails’ Debian package because it doesn’t work with gem and so gem will not know about it.
you should use gems for that:
# gem install rails –include-dependencies

if you located behind a firewall, export following value before gem using:
HTTP_PROXY=http://[username]:[password]@[proxyserver]:[port]

if you use some IDE like NetBeans [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBeans]with Ruby on Rails extension than after installing of ruby and rubygems packages
you can use NetBeans to install ruby extensions

installation of gems that require building of native extensions

some gems are simple set of ruby scripts and then can be just installed
some gems contain source code c/c++ and so before installing of such gems you should have:

**development environment
# apt-get install build-essential

**ruby development header files
# apt-get install ruby-dev

**header files of library that you want to build

for example: you want to have ruby driver for postgresql DB
# apt-get install postgresql-server-dev-8.3
# gem install postgres

enjoy it ..