In previous posts over the last few months I’ve written about the efforts to get the ports of FOX and FXRuby working in MacPorts for OS X “Leopard.” Now that that issue is (mostly) settled, the next thing I wanted to do was work out the steps required to provide a binary gem of FXRuby for OS X that didn’t depend on MacPorts. I’m pleased to report that as of today, with the release of version 1.6.14 of FXRuby, that binary gem is now available.

If you’re running OS X and using the built-in version of Ruby that comes with that operating system, you can install FXRuby by typing:

$ sudo gem install fxruby

Once the installation is complete, you can verify that it’s working properly by firing up irb and trying to require the library:

$ irb
>> require 'rubygems'
=> false
>> require 'fox16'
=> true
>> Fox.fxrubyversion
"1.6.14"

Hopefully, this will make it a lot easier for Mac users to get up and running with FXRuby. If you run into problems installing or using the gem, please report them on the FXRuby mailing list.