How to install Python

                  installation Python

                               For Python programming you need a working Python installation and a text editor. Python comes with its own editor IDLE, which is quite nice and totally sufficient for the beginning. As you get more into programming, you will probably switch to some other editor like emacs, vi or another.

                      The Python download page is http://www.python.org/download. The most recent version is 3.1, but any Python 2.x version since 2.2 will work for this tutorial. Be careful with the upcoming Python 3, though, as some major details will change and break this tutorial's examples. A version of this tutorial for Python 3 is at Non-Programmer's Tutorial for Python 3. There are various different installation files for different computer platforms available on the download site. Here are some specific instructions for the most common operating systems:

Linux, BSD and Unix users: 

                     You are probably lucky and Python is already installed on your machine. To test it type python on a command line. If you see something like that in the following section, you are set.If you have to install Python, just use the operating system's package manager or go to the repository where your packages are available and get Python. Alternatively, you can compile Python from scratch after downloading the source code. If you get the source code make sure you compile in the Tk extension if you want to use IDLE.

Mac users :

                  Starting from Mac OS X (Tiger), Python ships by default with the operating system, but you might want to update to the newer version (check the version by startingpython in a command line terminal). Also IDLE (the Python editor) might be missing in the standard installation. If you want to (re-)install Python, have a look at theMac page on the Python download site.

Windows users 

                Some computer manufacturers pre-install Python. To check if you already have it installed, open command prompt (cmd in run menu) or MS-DOS and type python. If it says "Bad command or file name" you will need to download the appropriate Windows installer (the normal one, if you do not have a 64-bit AMD or Intel chip). Start the installer by double-clicking it and follow the procedure.