I was trying to install the Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) today on my Ubuntu machine running
Precise Pangolin. I used William Lam’s post as a baseline for the installation – but since there are several differences with Ubuntu – I will post the steps here.

1. Do not install Ruby from apt-get it will not work
2. If you have already installed it the remove it
   sudo apt-get --purge remove ruby-rvm
3. sudo curl -L get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
4. sudo source /etc/profile
5. sudo bash -s stable < <(curl -s https://raw.github.com/wayneeseguin/rvm/master/binscripts/rvm-installer )
6. source /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh
7. gedit ~/.bashrc and add the following line to the end
   [[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"
8. source ~/.bashrc
9. rvm install 1.9.3-p327 --with-openssl-dir=$rvm_path/usr
10. gem install rvc
11. gem install ffi

Steps were taken from a mixture of these three sources

http://29a.ch/2011/10/28/rvm-on-ubuntu-11-10
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9056008/installed-ruby-1-9-3-with-rvm-but-command-line-doesnt-show-ruby-v/9056395#9056395
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8410885/how-do-i-install-ruby-with-libyaml-on-ubuntu-11-10

I now have RVC working and am looking forward to using it more.