A Byte of Python

For Linux/BSD users

If you are using a Linux distribution (such as Fedora, Mandrake, Debian, Gentoo, etc.) or a BSD system (such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, etc.), then you probably already have Python installed on your system.

To test if you have Python installed, open a shell program (such as konsole, gnome-terminal, etc.) and enter the command python -V and press enter key (notice the capital 'V').

$ python -V 
Python 2.4 

Note

$ is the prompt of the shell. This will be different for different systems, hence I will indicate the prompt by just the $ symbol.

If you see such version information, then you have Python installed already.

However, if you get a message like this:

$ python -V
bash: python: command not found

then, Python is not installed already. This is highly unlikely but possible.

In this case, you have two ways of installing Python on your system.