Recently I’ve had trouble installing native gem extensions on my OSX 10.8.2 laptop. It appears that some gems are specifically looking for /usr/bin/gcc-4.2 and fail to compile if that’s missing. When I checked /usr/bin I could only find /usr/bin/gcc.

I tried creating a symlink to gcc-4.2 and everything installed correctly:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.2

Hope this helps someone!