This article will help you to install Python 2.7.16 on your Ubuntu, Debian and LinuxMint operating systems. At writing time of this article Python 3.4.5 latest stable version is available to download and install. To install Python 3.4.5 visit following article.
Step 1 – Prerequsiteis
You must have installed the following prerequisites on your system. Execute the following commands on your system to install all required dependencies to build Python 2.7.
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install build-essential checkinstall sudo apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev libncursesw5-dev libssl-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev libc6-dev libbz2-dev
Step 2 – Download Python 2.7
Download Python using following command from python official site. You can also download latest version in place of specified below.
cd /usr/src sudo wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.16/Python-2.7.16.tgz
Now extract the downloaded package.
sudo tar xzf Python-2.7.16.tgz
Step 3 – Compile Python Source
Use below set of commands to compile Python source code on your system using altinstall.
cd Python-2.7.16 sudo ./configure --enable-optimizations sudo make altinstall
Step 4 – Check Python Version
Check the latest version installed of python using below command
python2.7 -V Python 2.7.16
Thanks,
nicely install but it’s ,python2.7.16 not the default. default one is 3.6.8. How I can make default python2.7.16 . Please let me know.
Hi, I will not suggest you change the default Python version. Changing the default Python may break the working of many application or entire operating system.
Worked like a treat.
In my case, the default python version for Ubunu got rekt, so apt could not function. I followed your process and used install instead of altinstall, because I needed to replace a broken 2.7.x default. Saved me re-installing Ubuntu
You’re the man!!
Thanks a lot!
I have compleated all steps but it still shows 2.7.6 ?
Thanks a lot, It really helped me!
Hello sir, Thank u for such great tutorial…
It helped me alot.
Once again thank you 🙂
Please consider that many patches are applied, and one important is the platform.py allowing to detect the ubuntu release version.
https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/python2.7
You can see a set of diff on the right side, named [python2.7_2.7.12-1ubuntu0~16.04.2.diff.gz]
Very Clear…Great one!!!
excuse me for wondering that how to cleanly remove them after installing because “make uninstall* seems not available
Thank you!
very straightforward setup for Windows Ubuntu Subsystem! Cheers!
Clean, sharp instructions, thanks kid 🙂
Awesome, you’re a lifesaver. They have python 2.14 now so if you just replace all the commands that have “2.7.13” with “2.7.14” it works fine
Thanks Rahul
Thanx, this worked – Got Python 2.7.14 working on an older Linux version, which runs on a laptop. Looks nice, but of course, no pip, and no image library. Working on getting these… But again, thanx. Previous Python version was 2.5, and now at least I have 2.7.14, from http://www.python.org, compiled from source, which was my objective. FYI: THe source download was in a .tar.xz form, and I did not have the xz-utils on my Linux version. I had to scp the python-2.7.14.tar.xz file over to a current CentOS box, run the “unxz” utility to decompress the 12 mb file into a 71 mb file, and scp it back to the laptop, where I could then do the ./configure, make and make install (I wanted to overwrite the old Python version). Looks like it all worked. Trick now is to get the image stuff and pip, which should be somewhere… (if it exists, it has to be somewhere, no?) 😉
This was very helpful. I’m new to python and this worked on the first try.
This fails when I get to step “wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.13/Python-2.7.13.tgz“.
This is what I get:
–2017-10-29 20:20:38– https://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.7.13/Python-2.7.13.tgz
Resolving http://www.python.org (www.python.org)… 151.101.84.223, 2a04:4e42:14::223
Connecting to http://www.python.org (www.python.org)|151.101.84.223|:443… connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response… 200 OK
Length: 17076672 (16M) [application/octet-stream]
Python-2.7.13.tgz: Permission denied
Hi, It looks you are facing issue with downloading file under /usr/src directory. Kindly switch to superuser to run commands or use sudo. I have updated the tutorial with sudo commands.
hello sir , i followed d your above step in my system. but when i type a command python -V in terminal its display older version(2.7.6).
equals, version wasn’t replace
Thanks dude, this worked a treat!
I followed instructions on Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.3 and ended up with latest python, but missing crucial modules like datetime and time.
Thanks for the article.
i would suggest running sudo apt-get update
before running the first two commands
If you are on Linux you will most likely need to add
–enable-unicode=ucs4
to the arguments of ./configure to keep it consistent with the ‘standard’ builds.
I get
E: Unable to locate package checkinstall
Thank you…. great!!
Thank you so much!
Great this was very helpful. One issues i found. I believe you need to run a: ‘sudo make’ command and allow that to run before you run the sudo make altinstall command.
Otherwise worked perfectly for me.