Install basics through aptitude
aptitude install ruby ruby1.8-dev libopenssl-ruby1.8 rdoc ri irb build-essential wget ssl-cert
Install newer gems from source
cd /tmp wget http://production.cf.rubygems.org/rubygems/rubygems-1.3.6.tgz tar zxf rubygems-1.3.6.tgz cd rubygems-1.3.6 ruby setup.rb ln -sfv /usr/bin/gem1.8 /usr/bin/gem
Now update
gem update --system
gem sources -a http://gems.github.com/ gem install capistrano