Thanks for all the help. I now have a working rake installation and a database at version 15. I've installed the following gems. gem install -v=2.0.2 rails gem install libxml-ruby (produced a number of what appeared to be errors, hopefully not an issue) gem install -v=0.9.93 composite_primary_keys I also had to install ruby-RMagick via: yum install ruby-RMagick