Question

I came from a Windows background whern it comes to development environments. I’m used to run .exe’s from everything I need to run and just forget.

I usually code in php, javascript, css, html and python.

Now, I have to use Linux at my work, in a non changeable Ubuntu 8.04, with permissions to upgrade my system using company’s repositories only.

I need to install Python 2.4.3 to start coding in an old legacy system. I had Python 2.5. I downloaded Python 2.4.3 tarballs, ran ./configure make and such. Everything worked out, but now the “default” installation is my system is Python2.4 instead of of Python2.5.

I want help from you to change it back, and if possible, some material to read about symlinks, multiple Python installations, virtualenvs and such: everything I need to know before installing/upgrading Python modules. I installed for example the ElementTree package and don’t even know in which Python installation it was installed.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

If you have root access you could just create a new simlink.

sudo mv /usr/bin/python /usr/bin/python2.4
sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python25 /usr/bin/python

I don’t have too much experience with ubuntu, but i guess it shouldn’t brake anything.

To learn more about ln read man ln.