Installing Python on Linux

The latest version of Ubuntu, **comes with Python 2.7 out of the box**. Python 3.2 can be installed and run with the following commands::

Older versions of Python aren't available from the official repository. However, if it's needed (for example to support legacy code), we can add an unsupported repository and install an older version of Python (2.5 in the example below)::

Installing setuptools and pip

While Python has an extensive standard library, the set of packages available from the Internet is even more extensive. In order to install them easily, we'll install the ``distribute`` package and then ``pip``::

Now, most Python packages can be installed using the ``pip`` command. For example, if we wanted to install Django::

A full list of ``pip``'s capabilities is available by typing ``pip --help``.