local gem installation (rails)

After following instruction on the creation of $HOME/gems, .gemrc, new environment variables, the necessity of sometimes remove source_cache directory, I still cannot install gems in my local directory, and Dreamhost has not responded to my request to install two gems for me (youtube and hpricot). I did:

gem install youtube --debug

and here is the result:

Exception `Errno::ENOENT' at /usr/lib/ruby/1.8/fileutils.rb:1016 - No such file or directory - /home/erlebach/gems/source_cache
Exception `ArgumentError' at /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/source_info_cache.rb:71 - marshal data too short
Exception `ArgumentError' at /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/source_info_cache.rb:71 - marshal data too short
Exception `LoadError' at /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27 - no such file to load -- Win32API
Exception `LoadError' at /usr/local/lib/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:34 - no such file to load -- Win32API


MY ENVIRONMENT:

gem env
RubyGems Environment:
- VERSION: 0.9.2 (0.9.2)
- INSTALLATION DIRECTORY: /home/erlebach/gems
- GEM PATH:
- /home/erlebach/gems
- /usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8
- REMOTE SOURCES:
- http://gems.rubyforge.org


Needless to say, I am completely stuck until this is resolved, either by dreamhost installing the gems, or figuring out my problem.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Gordon


Gordon Erlebacher
School of Computational Science
Florida State University
Tallahassee, Florida