[ILUG] Ruby installation

[kevin]

I am planning to introduce my young son to some programming. As a first
language I decided to start him off with Ruby. 

One question:

Reading around there seems to be an issue with using rubygems on Debian.
What is the accepted wisdom? Install everything using .debs or install
rubygems from source and only install the basic ruby package from the
package manager?

Are there similar issues with Fedora?

Thanks

Kevin.