Yes I can see why installing Ruby is frustrating wit those kinds of errors. The thing is, Debian split Ruby into multiple packages, but made a lot of them not i

Yes I can see why installing Ruby is frustrating wit those kinds of errors. The thing is, Debian split Ruby into multiple packages, but made a lot of them not installed by default, which causes a lot of headache for users. The mkmf thing is supposed to be a standard part of Ruby, and most developers assume it is always available, but I Debian put it in `ruby-dev` I think, so you get that error if you don't `apt-get install ruby-dev`. If you're not a Rubyist and just wants to use Chef, Chef's own Debian packages work great. You can ignore RubyGems and update-alternatives and other stuff, Chef's Debian packages provide everything you need. I think that Chef should go through the tutorials and clean up the old things.