Installing Python 2.7.9 or higher on Linux

Install Python 2.7.9 or higher (but lower than Python 3) to run Guardium® Application Framework SDK on the Linux operating system.

1. Log in as root or use sudo.
2. Verify your system is up to date: yum update
3. Install development tools: yum groupinstall -y "development tools"
4. Install development tools and extra libraries (not strictly needed to compile Python but required for the Python interpreter):
   • Ubuntu: yum install -y zlib-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel sqlite-devel readline-devel tk-devel gdbm-devel db4-devel libpcap-devel xz-devel expat-devel
   • CentOS: yum install -y zlib-devel, openssl-devel, openssl, libffi-devel
5. If you have a clean "minimal" install of CentOS, install the wget tool: yum install -y wget
6. Download, compile and install Python.

   # Python 2.7.0:
   wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.0/Python-2.7.0.tar.xz
   tar xf Python-2.7.0.tar.xz
   cd Python-2.7.0
   ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-unicode=ucs4 --enable-shared LDFLAGS="-Wl,-rpath /usr/local/lib"
   make && make altinstall

   The newly installed Python interpreter is available as /usr/local/bin/python2.7. The system version of Python 2.6.6 continues to be available as /usr/bin/python, /usr/bin/python2 and /usr/bin/python2.6.
7. To strip symbols from the shared library to reduce the memory footprint, enter: strip /usr/local/lib/libpython2.7.so.1.0
8. Make sure Python command points to the latest Python you installed. Then, to make the latest Python installation the default Python engine, run source ~/.bash_profile