Ubuntu comes with Python 2.7.2+ pre-installed. (I also downloaded the python dev packages.) Because of another issue I'm having (Explained in extreme depth in How do I replace/update the version of the expat library used by Apache? ), Graham Dumpleton told me my distro had explicitly built Python in a way to use an external pyexpat implementation, so causing my issue. He also said I could build Python myself from source code to resolve the issue. How would I do this on Ubuntu? (Keep in mind I'm new to Linux.)
解决方案At a shell prompt (in a terminal), run
sudo apt-get install build-essential
This will fetch all the common packages you need to build anything (e.g. the compiler etc.).
Then run
sudo apt-get build-dep python2.7
This will fetch all the libraries you need to build python.
Then download the source code for python and decompress it into a directory.
go there and run
./configure --prefix=/path/where/you/want/python/installed
Then make and then make install to get it built and installed:
make && make install
If you hit snags on the way, ask back here and I'll try to offer some guidance.