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Ruby, Gentoo Linux, and scientific computing -- I thought I'd spend a little time giving an overview of Gentoo Linux and why it's so well suited for scientific computing and for Ruby.
1. Nearly all of Gentoo Linux is built from source. The downside of this is that it takes longer to install a package. Some of the upsides are that you get code optimized to your machine, that in many cases it's trivial to package a piece of software for Gentoo, and you usually have access to the most recent stable *and* testing versions of a package. The packages I use the most generally show up at the testing level only a day or so after the package developer releases them. I've seen popular packages show up within 24 hours!
2. Just about everything a Rubyist or a scientist needs to do the job is already packaged. There are over 10,000 packages in the Gentoo repository, which is known as the Portage Tree. The R programming language, Octave, several clustering libraries, half a dozen symbolic math packages including the two most general, Axiom and Maxima, two TeX-based editors, TeXmacs and LyX, plus of course all the supporting TeX libraries, and hardware-tuned linear algebra (BLAS and LAPACK) using the ATLAS libraries are all available "out of the box".
3. For Rubyists, just about all the major Gems -- Rails, Rake, and Gem itself -- are part of Portage. Ruby itself is currently at a pre-release of 1.8.5 in the "testing" version of Portage, and 1.9 from CVS can also be installed if you want it.
4. If you're interested in "exotic" programming languages, most of them are also available in Portage. There are a few variants of ML -- at least OCAML and IIRC Standard ML of New Jersey. Dylan, Eiffel, Icon and Erlang are there, as is Lua. There are at least three implementations of Scheme and the "big four" Lisps -- GCL, SBCL, CMUCL and Clisp. Oh, yeah ... GFORTH is there too.