I've got a Linode 360 with Debian 5 64 bit (ext3). I wanted to install Compass and Sass (http://wiki.github.com/chriseppstein/compass), but had some trouble. After many wrong turns and dead ends, I realized it was just a simple path issue, so here's all you need to do:

$ sudo apt-get ruby rubygems
$ sudo gem install haml
$ sudo gem install compass
$ ln -s /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/compass /usr/local/bin/compass


Voila! Beautiful, small, semantic, CSS code for your sites. With mixins, variables, easily color manipulation (cf http://github.com/chriseppstein/compass-colors) and more. Check it out--you will never write CSS by hand again.