Ruby and Syslog

As others have also pointed out there is no ri documentation for the syslog module but there is a lot of useful stuff in the ext/syslog directory.

But here is the most basic example I can come up with:

irb(main):007:0> mdfranz@franz-t61:~$ irb
irb(main):001:0> require 'syslog'
=> true
irb(main):002:0> Syslog.open('labradoodle')
=> <#Syslog: opened=true, ident="labradoodle", options=3, facility=8, mask=255>
irb(main):003:0> Syslog.crit('w00f w00f')
=> <#Syslog: opened=true, ident="labradoodle", options=3, facility=8, mask=255>
irb(main):004:0> Syslog.close
=> nil
irb(main):005:0> Syslog.crit('w00f w00f')
RuntimeError: must open syslog before write
        from (irb):5:in `crit'
        from (irb):5
        from :0

And /var/log/syslog

Aug  8 10:03:22 franz-t61 labradoodle[3688]: w00f w00f
Aug  8 10:04:24 franz-t61 kernel: [ 9700.304000] iwl4965: REPLY_ADD_STA failed
Aug  8 10:06:27 franz-t61 kernel: [ 9823.088000] iwl4965: REPLY_ADD_STA failed

Debian + FXRI + Rubygems is Englightenment!

So unlike OSX FXRI on Debian (Etch) is a snap. This assumes you are running a self compiled 1.8.6 install with gems. All I had to do was apt-get install the following packages:

libfox-1.6-0

libfox-1.6-dev

All you really need is the *-dev of course. Which resulted in the following additional packages being installed:

The following NEW packages will be installed:
 libcupsys2-dev libexpat1-dev libfontconfig1-dev libfox-1.6-0 libfox-1.6-dev
 libfox-1.6-doc libfreetype6-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgnutls-dev
 libgpg-error-dev libjpeg62-dev liblzo-dev libopencdk8-dev libpng12-dev
 libpopt-dev libtasn1-3-dev libtiff4-dev libtiffxx0c2 libxcursor-dev
 libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxrender-dev x11proto-fixes-dev
 x11proto-render-dev

And then

root@franz-t61:~/Desktop/Downloads/ruby-1.8.6# gem install fxri
Need to update 3 gems from http://gems.rubyforge.org
...
complete
Install required dependency fxruby? [Yn]  Y
Select which gem to install for your platform (i686-linux)
1. fxruby 1.6.11 (ruby)
2. fxruby 1.6.11 (mswin32)
3. fxruby 1.6.10 (mswin32)
4. fxruby 1.6.10 (ruby)
5. Skip this gem
6. Cancel installation
> 1
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed fxri-0.3.6
Successfully installed fxruby-1.6.11
Installing ri documentation for fxruby-1.6.11...
Installing RDoc documentation for fxruby-1.6.11...

And even more amazingly, all the fifteen thousand of the API docs (builtins and gems) are there! Now the only thing weird was I had to fix the path env in the fxri start script.