Ruby 2.1 was released on the 25th December and we’re now including it in our Ubuntu packaging project. We’re providing packages for Ubuntu Precise, Quantal, Raring and Saucy (with Lucid packages on the way).
Ruby 2.1 brings some impressive performance improvements, due to a new generational garbage collector and an upgraded method caching system, but loads of other neat stuff like better support for profiling.
Our packages also patch a bug in rubygems 2.2.0 that causes a major performance regression when installing gems. Other than that though, the packages are stock upstream versions.
Just add our launchpad package repository and install the ruby2.1 package:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:brightbox/ruby-ng
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ruby2.1
ruby2.1 -v
ruby 2.1.0p0 (2013-12-25 revision 44422) [x86_64-linux-gnu]
Our repository also provides updated Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.3 packages too. More details on how to switch between versions on our docs page.
If you have any feedback or comments, or just want to follow along with the latest announcements, join the Google Groups list. All feedback is always welcome - we like to hear from you even if everything worked :)
Official Ubuntu images are available on Brightbox. Fire up a cloud server and get playing with Ruby 2.1 right away. If you’re not already a customer, you can sign up in about 2 minutes and have a server booted in 30 seconds.