Ubuntu – GNU Make not found – How to install GNU Make on 12.04

Regarding why your experience was difficult I'm not sure that can be answered without more knowledge of what exactly you did. Regarding your question of "is this pretty normal?" I'm not sure it can be answered definitively but I can relay my experience in hope that it's helpful!

I've been developing on Rails with Ubuntu for over two years and can say that I never had to deal with broken packages or touch/rebuild code in any of the required packages. I completely reinstall with every release and my experience has been that it's easier to setup my Rails environment with each release (likely due to growing experience). In general, after a clean install of Ubuntu, I would say that it takes me under an hour (at times much less) to get my environment to the stage where it was before the clean install.

A couple days ago I followed the linked tutorial to completely re-setup my Rails development environment on 11.10. I previously was using package manager Ruby packages, which worked fine until I needed to run multiple versions of Ruby. Note that relying on the package manager packages for Ruby development is generally considered not the best way to develop Ruby on Ubuntu (see the linked article for details) but it has always worked fine for me in the past (when you only need one version of Ruby, Rails and Gems).

I think one thing that differentiates Linux from some other OS's is the ability to go about doing something in many different ways, while in some other OS's it may only be possible in one particular way. This is true of setting up your development environment (there are multiple ways to do it) and it's easy to see this leading to confusion and the need to consult different guides. From my limited experience, using the RVM bash install script in the linked article has been the easiest (that is, considering the major benefits of RVM, if RVM is of no benefit to you then there may be easier ways such as the package manager).

If you are more familiar with developing in Windows and are setting up Ubuntu for development for the first time I think it's reasonable to expect it to take longer simply because many things take longer the first time we learn to do them. If it ends up being "traumatic" then I just hope you can find the experience and knowledge that you gained valuable :)

http://ryanbigg.com/2010/12/ubuntu-ruby-rvm-rails-and-you/

The real solution is, as correctly pointed out by Amit Patel, to install libpq-dev

Here is a workaround if you were unable to setup pg at you development machine. You can use sqlite in your local machine and pg in Heroku. Here is what you should have in your Gemfile

group :production do
  gem 'pg'
end

group :development, :test do
  gem 'sqlite3'
end

And use this command for installing bundle to ignore production gems:

bundle install --without production

Please keep in mind that not having same environment in production and development machines is not recommended.