Installing on CentOS Fedora
This page assumes that you're reasonably capable of installing packages in CentOS/Fedora using Yum and that you've compiled software for linux before.
This page basically covers how to use the upstream sources to build required software. An alternative way based on rebuilding RPM:s is available at RPM installation on Fedora
You'll need to grab make, gcc-c++ to compile Ruby and some gems. You'll also need to get zlib-devel and openssl-devel for adding support for these libraries into Ruby. Lastly, now is a good time to get ImageMagick as well.
Since all of these command will need to be run as root, either su - to login as root, or use sudo.
su -
yum install make gcc-c++ zlib-devel openssl-devel ImageMagick
Accept and install any dependencies that you're prompted to install for the above packages as well.
Download the latest version of Ruby 1.8.7 from http://ruby-lang.org. This is p330 as of Feb 9, 2011.
mkdir /usr/local/src
cd /usr/local/src
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p330.tar.bz2
tar -xvf ruby-1.8.7-p330.tar.bz2
The following steps will do the following, install Ruby, add zlib support, add openssl support, reinstall Ruby. (@SmittyHalibut 2010-11-25: The first "make" gave me an error saying that Tk was compiled to use pthreads, but Ruby was not. It suggested adding "--enable-pthread" to the "./configure" line. I've updated the build commands below accordingly.)
cd ruby-1.8.7-p330
./configure --enable-pthread
make
make install
cd ext/zlib
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install
cd ../openssl
ruby extconf.rb
make
make install
cd ../..
make
make install
You should now have Ruby installed with zlib and openssl support. Run ruby -v to make sure it's running and working.
[root@machine ~]$ ruby -v
ruby 1.8.7 (2010-08-16 patchlevel 330) [i686-linux]
Note: Your version string may say 'x86_64' if you're on a 64-bit OS.
Next you'll need to install Rubygems. 1.5.0 as of Feb 09, 2011.
cd /usr/local/src
wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.5.0.tgz
tar -xvf rubygems-1.5.0.tgz
cd rubygems-1.5.0
ruby setup.rb
You can check if gem has been installed correctly by running gem -v and gem list.
[root@machine ~]$ gem -v
1.5.0
wget http://redis.googlecode.com/files/redis-2.2.7.tar.gz
tar xzf redis-2.2.7.tar.gz
cd redis-2.2.7
make
make install
cp /usr/local/src/redis-2.2.7/redis.conf /etc/
yum install mysql
yum install mysql-server
yum install mysql-devel
service mysql start
Git isn't available in the default CentOS repositories. You have to add the Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux repositories to get it. Information on how to install the repo can be found over at the Fedora Project website. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
Once you've installed the repository files, you just need to use yum to grab it.
yum install git
You should look into Handling bug 360
Now that you have proper versions of ruby and gem, MySQL and git installed, you can follow the standard Diaspora installation instructions.
If anyone is interested in making it possible to use apache instead of the thin webserver, a starting point is at Using apache