This was a lot trickier than it should have been due to a new “feature” in REE whereby it reports its version on two lines like this: [root@myserver rmagick]# ruby -v ruby 1.8.6 (2008-08-11 patchlevel 287) [i686-linux] Ruby Enterprise Edition 20090610 Unfortunately the RMagick gem uses this to initialize a string constant, RUBY_VERSION_STRING used in rmmain.c. The constant is defined in “configu