I’ve decided to finally tackle learning rails by developing my next project in it.

However I was setting up Ruby/Rails when trying to run gem install rails returned this error:

/usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load – zlib (LoadError)

After I ran yum install zlib* and hit yes to the devel libraries, went back to ruby source, did make clean, ./configure, make, make install then switched to the ruby gem source and ran ruby setup.rb and then gem install rails worked fine.