Installing Python on OSX, GNU/Linux, and Windows

Ethan Willis
University of Memphis Data Science
3 min readFeb 12, 2015

Windows Installation

Installation of Python on Windows is fairly straightforward:

  1. ) Go to the Python.org’s Download Page for Python 2.7.9 and scroll down to the Files section, shown in the image below.
Python Installers

2.) Download either the “Windowx x86–64 MSI installer” or the “Windows x86 MSI installer.” The difference is that the first x86–64 installer is for a 64-bit version of Windows and the regular x86 installer is for the 32-bit version of Windows. Nowadays the x86–64 installer will typically work on your system, and if you have a 64-bit system it is better to download that installer.

3.) On your system navigate to where you downloaded the installer and run it. Then progress through the installer program’s steps.

4.) After going through the installer’s steps you should now have links to the python IDLE editor in your Start Menu.

Installation on OSX

1.) Go to the Python.org’s Download Page for Python 2.7.9 and scroll down to the Files section, shown in the image below.

Python Installers

2.) Download either the “Mac OSX 64-bit/32-bit installer.” Unless you have a much older Mac make sure not to download the PPC installer.

3.) Once the installer program has finished downloading, navigate with Finder to where you downloaded it and run it.

4.) Go through all of the installer’s steps. After doing so: press the command key and the space bar at the same time. Type in “idle” and press enter in order to begin writing Python code!

Running the Python code editor IDLE.

Installing Python + IDLE on GNU/Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS)

For Ubuntu:
1.) In order to install Python 2.7.9 you will end up installing the Python 2.7 Package. On a terminal run the following command : “sudo apt-get install python2.7"

2.) To install the IDLE editor simply run the following command on a terminal: “sudo apt-get install idle”

For CentOS/RedHat Variants
1.) Because of how CentOS is engineered it has dependencies for Python 2.6. In order to install Python 2.7.9 you will need to download the source code for Python 2.7.9, compile it, and install it manually. For this step follow the general instructions given by Digital Ocean

2.) Fortunately installing the IDLE python code editor is much easier. Simply run this command in a terminal: “yum install python-tools”

Running the IDLE editor in GNU/Linux.
To run the IDLE editor on either RedHat/Ubuntu Derived GNU/Linux distributions simply run the command “idle” within a terminal.

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