To get up and running quickly on your Debian system we just need to follow the following steps:

Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb ftp://www.gfd-dennou.org/arch/ruby/products/debian stable

Run apt-get update to update your apt sources, then we will apt-get to install the necessary packages to run Ruby-VTK.

apt-get intall ruby
apt-get install libvtk4
apt-get install libvtk4-dev
apt-get install vtkdata
apt-get intall ruby-vtk

Once we have all the needed software via our package manager we need to make some changes to our environment.

Add these lines to your profile:

VTK_DATA_ROOT="/usr/share/data"
export VTK_DATA_ROOT

We are now ready to run our first Ruby-VTK script!

We need to grab the examples from the Dennou site, they can be found in the source tarball on the Ruby-VTK page.

wget http://www.gfd-dennou.org/arch/ruby/products/ruby-vtk/vtk-ruby-060413.tar.gz
tar zxvf vtk-ruby-060413.tar.gz
cd vtk-ruby-060413
cd samples/Medical
ruby Medical3.rb

pretty neat eh? This will get you started with Ruby-VTK on Debian. After my VTK textbook arrives, I will be posting various manipulations of datasets… with Ruby of course!