Debian – How to install Python 2.6 on Debian 5.0 (lenny) using apt-get

debiandebian-lennypython

After some digging and experimentation, I figured out how to install Python 2.6 on Debian 5.0 using apt-get. So I thought it best to post on SF as a question and answer. I know this can be manually built and installed, but many people prefer to use apt-get (including myself).

Best Answer

This is a good way to break your system; you'll wind up upgrading all sorts of stable things to unstable, and you'll have trouble from then on, because Debian isn't designed to run on a system that's halfway stable and halfway unstable.

A better way is a backport, but it's not straightforward to backport 2.6 to lenny apparently.

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Mysql – How to install MySQLdb on a Python 2.6 source build, on Debian Lenny

Turns out this is extremely easy! I realise now that it builds against whatever version of python you launch setup.py with - in my case I had python symlinked to python2.5

So, instead of running python, run python2.6:

# python2.6 setup.py build
running build
running build_py
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.6
copying _mysql_exceptions.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.6
creating build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.6/MySQLdb
-- snip --

Python – Debian Lenny, Python 2.7 and mod_wsgi

Problem solved. mod_python was also loaded, disabling it did the trick. As it is the vanilla mod_python shipped with Lenny’s Apache, it is compiled against Python 2.5.2—naturally, this cannot work in combination with mod_wsgi compiled against a different version.

Best Answer

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