User:Rmyers/IDLE on the XO

IDLE is the default IDE for Python. The XO has a very limited Python viewer and editor Pippy. There is a more advanced environment Develop under development.

I decided to try to get the IDLE environment working on the XO. I wanted an XO based Python IDE that I could use to show Python code, and which would allow intermediate level development directly on the XO. As Develop matures this will probably no longer be necessary.

Warning:

I have successfully istalled IDLE on my XO. However this document is a work in progress and may contain errors. This message will be removed when I'm confident in this document's essential accuracy. Hopefully this will be by about 7/25/08.

What's already there

The Python 2.5 distribution that comes on the XO already contains IDLE. The IDLE library is located at /usr/lib/Python2.5/idlelib. The IDLE main module is idle.py.

So in a terminal window you ought to be able to

   cd /usr/lib/python2.5/idlelib
   python idle.py

to fire it up.

This doesn't quite work. You'll get a message that tkinter is missing.