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...