Installing Python at Home

These instructions are intended to get you an environment very similar to the one you’ll be using during the Coder’s Club. Before you start:

  • you will be installing software from the internet, you MUST get permission from the owner of the computer to do this (likely your parents)

  • there are different instructions for Windows, Mac (Apple/OS-X) and Linux, you need to choose the set for your computer

You do not need a particularly powerful computer to program. While most programmers use ridiculously powerful machines, you can start with any old machine.

What We are Doing

At the end of this process, you should have:

  • the programming language Python (version 2.7 on everything save Mac)

  • the multimedia/graphics/audio library Pygame

  • an editor for (Python) code (PyScripter, PyCharm, or MS Code)

Note

You did get permission from the owner of the machine, right? Do that now.

Windows Installation 10+

We are going to download these packages to your computer and then run the installers we have downloaded:

Start a PowerShell window and test if you can run Python from the window:

$ python

Note

If you can’t run python this way, you likely have to add Python’s directory to the PATH in system settings

Install pygame:

$ python -m pip install pygame

Mac/OS-X Installation

Note

Appologies up-front, this is the least pleasant environment to setup. OS-X has Python installed, but most Python packages, and particularly Pygame, don’t work well with the built-in Python interpreter.

You should follow these instructions which will set you up with a Python 3 environment, but are at least known to work.

Linux Installation

You need the following packages on Debian/Ubuntu machines (this includes the Raspberry Pi):

  • python3 (this is likely already installed on a modern Linux)

  • python3-pygame (you can install this either via apt/yum or using pip3 install pygame

You can install both packages on Ubuntu with:

$ sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pygame