Snow Leopard and ruby-serialport

September 06, 2009 | 1 Minute Read

As soon as I upgraded to Snow Leopard, my mastery of the hardware serial port looked decidedly unhealthy:

peter@McMullen ~/Documents/saphum $ irb -r ifos/ifos.rb
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ruby-serialport-0.7.0/lib/serialport.bundle: dlopen(/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ruby-serialport-0.7.0/lib/serialport.bundle, 9): no suitable image found. Did find: (LoadError)
        /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ruby-serialport-0.7.0/lib/serialport.bundle: no matching architecture in universal wrapper - /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ruby-serialport-0.7.0/lib/serialport.bundle
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
        from /Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ruby-serialport-0.7.0/lib/serialport.rb:1
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `gem_original_require'
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require'
        from ../modbus/modbus.rb:25
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
        from ./ifos.rb:19
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `gem_original_require'
        from /Library/Ruby/Site/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:31:in `require'
        from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:253:in `load_modules'
        from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:251:in `each'
        from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:251:in `load_modules'
        from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb/init.rb:21:in `setup'
        from /System/Library/Frameworks/Ruby.framework/Versions/1.8/usr/lib/ruby/1.8/irb.rb:54:in `start'
        from /usr/bin/irb:13

Thanks to Matt Aimonetti for a timely explanation of why certain Ruby extensions might suddenly stop working after the upgrade. (Short version: they’re compiled for 32-bit; Snow Leopard runs 64-bit by default.) He even provided a script (sl_gems_update.rb) to identify other gems that might be affected. In my case, ruby-serialport was the only one:

peter@McMullen ~/Documents/saphum $ ./sl_gems_update.rb
looking for the gems to upgrade...
***
Please reinstall:
ruby-serialport versions: 0.7.0, 0.7.0
or uninstall all gems that need to be reinstalled:
$ sudo gem uninstall ruby-serialport

and reinstall them:
$ sudo gem install ruby-serialport
peter@McMullen ~/Documents/saphum $ sudo gem uninstall ruby-serialport
Successfully uninstalled ruby-serialport-0.7.0
peter@McMullen ~/Documents/saphum $ sudo gem install ruby-serialport
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
Successfully installed ruby-serialport-0.7.0
1 gem installed
Installing ri documentation for ruby-serialport-0.7.0...
Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-serialport-0.7.0...
peter@McMullen ~/Documents/saphum $

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Snow Leopard and ruby-serialport