I have tried everything I can think of to get this to work, to no avail so here I am requesting suggestions on how to debug. Firstly, runnning Ubuntu 11.10 Installed rvm: $ bash < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer) Installed readline using apt-get: $ sudo apt-get install libreadline-dev Check for readline install: $ dpkg --get-selections | grep readl