UPDATE: Thanks to Ryan, Ant and Fern for the tips. With that in mind I found an online Slicehost tutorial that contained the steps and explained how to install ruby via apt-get, then get the latest rubygems, install that manually, ran gem to update itself, then run gem to install rails – as suggested. The steps I took from that page:
In the early days of this blog I used to run it on Typo, which *was* a great Ruby on Rails blogging platform (at one time). Unfortunately the project stalled (for years) and I ended up jumping ship after a few months of bugs and the ever crashing Rails server, WEBrick. Yes, if you search Netcraft you could see that was my *exposed* server at the time…not good! 
Now if you look, Typo is still kicking, and it *may* be a solid platform now, I hope it is, as I even contributed a ton of the achieved themes that live on in the ‘Theme Garden’ there. But on I moved into the world of MySQL/PHP front end sites via great apps like Drupal and WordPress, fast forward, Ruby on Rails is a mature platform now, and I am evaluating webapps at work, so I needed to install Rails on Debian GNU/Linux (but of course these directions would work just as well in Ubuntu Linux. It’s amazing simple, I took some steps from the Ruby on Rails wiki, first install the dependencies for good measure:
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