Prerequisites and tools

First, let's make sure our environment is properly configured. For this course, I assume you are using a Debian-like Linux distribution, such as Mint (http://www.linuxmint.com/) or Ubuntu (http://ubuntu.com/). All the instructions will be geared towards these systems.

Let's begin by installing the required Debian packages with apt-get as follows:

sudo apt-get install python-dev python-pip

This will install the Python development tools and libraries required for compiling Python packages, and pip: a neat tool you can use to install Python packages from the command line. On with it! Let's install our virtual environment managing tool:

sudo pip install virtualenvwrapper
echo "source /usr/local/bin/virtualenvwrapper.sh" >> ~/.bashrc

To explain what we just did: sudo tells our OS that we want administrative privileges to run the next command, and pip is the default Python package management tool and helps us install the virtualenvwrapper package. The second command statement adds a command to load the virtualenvwrapper.sh script together with the console, so that commands work inside your shell (we'll be using it, by the way).