Ruby with RailsInstaller cannot create native gem extensions on Windows

Question

After installing Ruby + Rails on Windows with RailsInstaller, I was not able to install any stones needed to create my own extensions. Error:

C:\Users\Admin>gem install rdiscount Building native extensions. This could take a while... ERROR: Error installing rdiscount: ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension. C:/Rails/Ruby1.9.2/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb Gem files will remain installed in C:/Rails/Ruby1.9.2/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/r discount-1.6.8 for inspection. Results logged to C:/Rails/Ruby1.9.2/lib/ruby/gems/1.9.1/gems/rdiscount-1.6.8/ex t/gem_make.out 

The contents of gem_make.out:

 C:/Rails/Ruby1.9.2/bin/ruby.exe extconf.rb 

I already went through this troubleshooting page , but did not fix this error. It seems that Ruby cannot spawn child processes, because when I run extconf.rb manually, it works.

PATH:

 C:\Rails\DevKit\bin;C:\Rails\DevKit\mingw\bin;C:\Rails\Git\cmd;C:\Rails\Ruby1.9.2\bin;C:\Program Files\AMD APP\bin\x86;C:\Program Files\NVIDIA Corporation\PhysX\Common;%SystemRoot%\system32;%SystemRoot%;%SystemRoot%\System32\Wbem;%SYSTEMROOT%\System32\WindowsPowerShell\v1.0\;C:\Program Files\nodejs\ 

I hope someone can help me with this issue.

Answer 1

Unless you have a compelling reason to run natively on Windows, I would install VirtualBox and just run Ubuntu or your favorite Linux flavor for Rails. Everything will work much more smoothly.