In part 3 I’ll show how did I prepare my ASRock powered Ubuntu workstation at home with necessary tools related to my programming in python 2.6 and 3.1.
Fair warning: if I have a choice to install some software on Linux with official package manager, then I’ll always prefer this way over installing from source, no matter how recent source might be. That means that I’m not necessarily getting the bleeding edge packages, but on the other hand I’m sure I’m getting in return a stable, secure and easy to maintain system that takes care of dependencies during installation, uninstalls software for me, installs security fixes for me etc.

# -------------------------------------
# install python 3.1 (python 2.6
# was already installed)
# -------------------------------------
$ sudo apt-get install python3.1

# -------------------------------------
# Install setup tools for 2.6 and 3.1
# -------------------------------------
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev python-setuptools
$ sudo apt-get install python3-dev python3-setuptools

# -------------------------------------
# install IDLE for both, 2.6 and 3.1
# You'll find shortcuts for IDLE under
# Applications -> Programming
# -------------------------------------
$ sudo apt-get install idle-python2.6
$ sudo apt-get install idle-python3.1

# -------------------------------------
# Install PyQT 4 (4.7.2 is current
# version in ubuntu deb repository)
# -------------------------------------
$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4
$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4-doc
$ sudo apt-get install pyqt4-dev-tools
$ sudo apt-get install qt4-designer
$ sudo apt-get install qt4-dev-tools

# --------------------------------------
# Installing cx_Oracle (5.0.4)
# (see above section in which I
# already installed setuptools, 
# easy_install won't work without them!)
# --------------------------------------

# I'm using Oracle11g R2 on Lucid Lynx

$ export ORACLE_HOME=/oracle/ora11
$ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/lib
$ export PATH=$ORACLE_HOME/bin:$PATH

# for python 2.6
$ sudo -E easy_install cx_Oracle

# for python 3.1 run:
$ sudo -E easy_install3 cx_Oracle

# ------------------------------
# Installing cx_Freeze
# ------------------------------

# for python 2.6
$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev 
$ sudo -E easy_install cx_Freeze

# if you're using python 3.1
$ sudo apt-get install libffi-dev
$ sudo -E easy_install3 cx_Freeze

# Install Eric (Python/Ruby) IDE
# --------------------------------------
$ sudo apt-get install eric