On any Debian Etch or Ubuntu Hardy box, running gem tends to do a source update (‘Bulk updating Gem source index for: http://gems.rubyforge.org/’) and go super slow. Especially on low memory virtual machines. I could put in a purchase order for another 40GB of RAM, oorrrr…. Rumors were that newer versions of rubygems were better, so I went about upgrading hardy the debian way. And it’s much better.

Put intrepid in your sources.list. Puppet manages mine for my network so I use sources.list.d:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/intrepid.sources.list:
deb-src http://mirrors.cat.pdx.edu/ubuntu/ intrepid main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://mirrors.cat.pdx.edu/ubuntu/ intrepid-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu intrepid-security main restricted universe multiverse

Then (basically)

sudo apt-get update
mkdir /tmp/rubydeb
cd /tmp/rubydeb
sudo apt-get build-dep ruby1.8 ruby1.9 rubygems
sudo apt-get source ruby1.8 ruby1.9 rubygems
# run dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot in ruby1.8 and ruby1.9
# sudo dpkg -i the resulting appropriate debs (you need ruby1.9 to build rubygems)
# run dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot in rubygems
sudo apt-get remove libgems-ruby1.8 rubygems
# sudo dpkg -i the new rubygems deb

Everything seems good, life seems better.