Documentation (and detailed install instructions) can be found online at http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/DocumentationStart . Generally, you need the following things installed: * Ruby >= 1.8.1 (earlier releases might work but probably not) * The Ruby OpenSSL library. For some reason, this often isn't included in the main ruby distributions. You can test for it by running 'ruby -ropenssl -e "puts :yep"'. If that errors out, you're missing the library. If your distribution doesn't come with the necessary library (e.g., on Debian and Ubuntu you need to install libopenssl-ruby), then you'll probably have to compile Ruby yourself, since it's part of the standard library and not available separately. You could probably just compile and install that one library, though. * The Ruby XMLRPC client and server libraries. For some reason, this often isn't included in the main ruby distributions. You can test for it by running 'ruby -rxmlrpc/client -e "puts :yep"'. If that errors out, you're missing the library. * Facter => 1.1.1 You can get this from < http://reductivelabs.com/projects/facter > $Id: README 2549 2007-06-03 19:36:02Z ajax $