While Gosu does require native compilation, the developers thankfully require pre-compiled packages for Windows and OS X. On Windows and OS X, Gosu can be installed with a single gem command.
You will, of course, need to install Ruby first. At the time of this writing, Gosu works fine with Ruby 1.8.6, 1.8.7 and 1.9.2, so any of these versions will work. Once you've installed Ruby, issue the following gem install command.
$ gem install gosu
On Linux, things will be a bit more complex. However, Gosu development is not out of reach, all you need to do is install a few development libraries and when you install Gosu with the gem command, it will compile from source. The following commands will work on Ubuntu Linux, if you're using another distribution, you'll have to find equivalent development packages to install.
$ sudo apt-get install g++ libgl1-mesa-dev libpango1.0-dev libboost-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev
$ gem install gosu
This article is part of a series. Read more articles about Rapid Game Prototyping in Ruby
