Installing passenger on ubuntu has some issues

I followed the instructions on the Ubuntu site and the modrails site and everything would install fine but I could never get passenger to serve pages to apache.

Passenger assumes the permissions of the default apache user. And if you don’t set up your default user as www-data when you install Ubuntu Passenger wont have permission to run the app.

Open up /etc/apache2/envvars and change the www-data user and group to match your default user and group and you should be set.