How to create development Python environment on Linux.

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Thanks Zach, that's a big help. The only reason I want to get a Python 2.7 environment working first is because I'll be working on third party code and that's the platform it uses. For any new projects I would use Python 3.

After considering your guidance I think what I will do is install virtualenv using apt-get and then use that to create a dev environment. Is it ok to run get-pip.py in a virtual environment?

I won't worry about using the latest version of 2.7 for now, since it's only one or two third party open source projects I'll use 2.7 for and they don't need a more recent version.

There are a couple of other things I'm not quite clear on, such as where it would be best to create my new virtual environment (I'm tempted to put it in /usr/local if that means it can be used by all user accounts on my machine), and how I can can control which Python environment is used by the various system and user programs that depend on them, but I expect I can find that information on the web, though I'll make another post here if I do get stuck.