RVM hangs on 'Installing required packages' on Debian

Question

I installed rvm on debian 7 using the command:

\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --rails

from this article:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-install-ruby-on-rails-on-an-debian-7-0-wheezy-vps-using-rvm

I get this output:

Searching for binary rubies, this might take some time. Found remote file https://rvm.io/binaries/debian/7/x86_64/ruby-2.1.0.tar.bz2 Checking requirements for debian. Installing requirements for debian. Updating system... Installing required packages: gawk, g++, libreadline6-dev, zlib1g-dev, libssl-dev, libyaml-dev, libsqlite3-dev, sqlite3, autoconf, libgdbm-dev, libncurses5-dev, automake, libtool, bison, pkg-config, libffi-dev

It hangs here forever. I tried waiting about 30 min. I also tried hitting ctrl-c and running some rvm commands. rvm list known works fine, but rvm install gets me back to the same "installing requirements" and it hangs as well.

Any ideas? Googleing only seemed to bring up issues involving OSX (I'm using debian in a vbox in windows 8).

Would installing each required package indiviually via apt-get be the best move?

Answer 1

Just remove the cdrom entry from the sources.list file. This can be done easily:

sudo sed -i '/cdrom/d' /etc/apt/sources.list

This should take care of the problem. The message is because somehow you still have the cdrom entry in your sources.list file, you can check the content of the file using:

Answer 2

I encountered the same issue with Debian 8. As it turns out, the installation was looking for the required packages on the Debian install CD-ROM, which wasn't inserted. To fix this, run the following command:

nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Then, comment out the line beginning with "cdrom" so that it looks like the following:

# cdrom:[Debian GNU/Linux...

You should be able to run sudo apt-get update then try installing rvm again. However, I restarted my laptop before doing so. Therefore, I can't give 100% confirmation that it works without restarting.

Answer 3

I faced the same issue. To resolve, just mount the installation CD that you used to install Debian and it will work.

Answer 4

As i've written in comment, try installing requirements by hand, sometimes something wilk silently fail and cause such issues. As OP found, the gawk package was causing the issue.