Just shy of two days was enough to let me make the lives of Ruby scribblers using the ever-awesome SliTaz Linux distribution that little bit sweeter. Sure, anyone with Ruby and its add-on system RubyGems can run web apps via Ruby on Rails in a snap, but what about desktop apps? Well…

Coming soon to a package manager near you:

Ruby/Gtk+ !

The package is oh-so-very-nearly ready to be uploaded to the servers - I’ll just tidy up the build instructions a little and await a little feedback from the adventurous, before-hand. The only thing you devs will need to do is install the ruby-gtk2 package alongside the Gtk+-dev stuff and include one of these lines at the start of your Ruby code, depending on which bit you want:

require 'gtk2'

require 'libglade'

As I’m using Glade to design my interface for me (stop laughing) I also used the slightly older LibGlade library, which is being replaced by GtkBuilder, with a tool to link them together. It still works very well though, as I shall demonstrate in a couple of future posts on the subject.

Stay tuned!