Rails Hates me

So, I've got a little extra time, and I figured it was time to get back to my rails project. I've half written this character-timeline-thingy maybe three or four times but never quite completed it. As I recall, I had it almost-completely-working maybe a year and a half ago, so I thought I'd take it out for a spin on my new macbook with its built-in rails mojo.

I grabbed my old files off of my external hard drive and: No love. No mysql. Oh, of course. Installed mysql and a visual editor, felt warm and fuzzy about that process. Created the tables with the table-creation script I created when I used this last time, made another mental note to look into rails' migrations and

$ rake...

Fail. My tests are talking about fixtures that have some kind of problem. This is fixed, and something else doesn't work, a nil where I didn't expect it. Oookay, bwuh? Maybe this is just old and I'll start over. It's got deprecation warnings in it too, so meh.

$ mv timemachine timemachineOldAndBusted
$ rails timemachine
$ rake

Fail again. The mysql gem isn't installed by default anymore. Okay, so:

$ sudo gem install mysql

Fail again. some crap about headers and native extensions. I turn to google, and go through a lot of gymnastics around installing stuff from source, upgrading gems itself, etc. etc. I follow all the directions I see in a pretty helpful article, everything seems to be passing and:

$ mv timemachine timemachineFail
$ rails -d mysql timemachine
$ rake

Fail. Now it says that the mysql gem isn't installed, but gem list says it is. Back to google, now the suggestion is to do some trickery with 64-bit mysql vs 32-bit mysql and binary hacking the broken mysql.bundle file to fix the problem.

This all feels like why Java and platform independence is still important. I'm tired of mucking with building from source into my operating system. AppEngine supports Java, right?