RHEL Update 2 fixes OpenSSL problem for Ruby

I don’t know what changed exactly, but I can now use OpenSSL in Ruby. I just recompiled ruby 1.8.3 from source after a “yum update” to Update 2 and now I can use OpenSSL:

[root@serv02 /]# cat /etc/redhat-release
Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS release 4 (Nahant Update 2)
[root@serv02 /]# which irb
/usr/local/ruby/1.8.3/bin/irb
[root@serv02 /]# irb
irb(main):001:0> require "openssl"
=> true

Rejoice!

An unfortunate side effect of Red Hat’s decision to split their offering between free and non-free (i.e. Fedora and RHEL) is that the Enterprise product is rapidly loosing mind share outside of, well, the enterprise. More and more I hit problems getting open source projects to build and/or run on RHEL4. This is going to have to change or Red Hat’s RHEL will risk becoming a Solaris of yesteryear. Irrelevant. CentOS isn’t the answer. I do find it somewhat ironic that Sun has the more customer / user friendly model these days making it free to download and run Solaris and just charging you for support when you need it.