Installing Python

Let’s suppose you’re interested in learning about Python, or want to install it on your computer for the first time.  If you have a 64bit OS, I strongly suggest that you install the 32bit version.  I’m certainly no expert in Python, but I think this is the best way to avoid possible headaches in the future.  Like the headache I’ve been dealing with…

As mentioned before, I’ve been fooling around with some basic computational modeling using Python, VPython and Scratch.  Earlier this weekend I decided to reinstall Windows 8 on my home computer because I wanted the 64bit version, so this evening I went about the task of reinstalling Python.  I thought it would make sense to install the 64bit version of Python, but I hit a few obstacles.  It turns out that to install Kurt, which I also wanted for a Scratch to Python interpreter (which is a whole other story), I would first need to install setuptools.  However, the 64bit installer for setuptools doesn’t work, so I installed via a script ez_setup.py.  Then when I went back to kurt, I started getting errors.  The first problem related to not having a compiler installed.  The solutions to this were to install Visual Studio 2008 or MinGW.  I didn’t know where to find VS 2008, so I went the MinGW route.  That didn’t entirely work for me, and I’m guessing it might have something to do with the 64bit vs 32bit gambit.  Or it could from any number of things I guess, I really have no idea.  I had already put an hour into the dog’n’pony show and had enough.  So I uninstalled everything and started from the beginning.  Downloading all 32bit versions, I installed Python, then VPython (which also installs wxpython which is needed for Scratch interpreter), then setuptools, and finally kurt.  No errors and it took maybe 5 minutes.

If a lot of the above is confusing to you, welcome to the club. I barely understand what I was doing!  Well, I now have a general idea but there’s still a lot of black voodoo magic stuff happening behind the scenes as far as I can tell.

FWIW, I first thought I would install Python via the Enthought distribution, which I thought would include all of the libraries and “stuff” that I would need.  That quickly turned bad on me too.  It appears that Vpython doesn’t come with Enthought, and it also appears that people get errors when installing Vpython with Enthought.  Somewhere there is an error and some fix, but again it’s just a wee over my head.