Because its not readily apparent when you’re concentrating on learning rails… I’m posting this here. While trying to get rails running on Fedora Core 6 (FC6) I was running into not being able to compile the ruby fcgi gem.

What gives, right? mod_fcgid (what FC6 comes with) is supposed to be binary compatible with mod_fastcgi. And there *IS* no mod_fastcgi or fastcgi in yum! Well it turns out that

mod_fcgid and mod_fastcgi both connect to fastcgi. That bears repeating. mod_fcgid is roughly equivalent to mod_fastcgi but niether are equivalent to fastcgi. (which in retrospect seems obvious as so many things do when you’re searching for answers)

so… on FC6, install mod_fcgid. then download and install fastcgi (not mod_fastcgi) from http://www.fastcgi.com/dist/ and then

gem install fcgi --source \
  http://rubyforge.planetargon.com/gems.rubyforge.org/ \
  -- \
  --with-fcgi-include=/usr/local/include \
  --with-fcgi-lib=/usr/local/lib

will work and everything will be peachy-keen

since a lot of people will be searching about this in a specific scope for Fedora Core 6, and since nobody seems to directly state this issue in plain terms, here it is. Google, eat me up!