Starting work on some python driver development today for the ant+ system (more on this later) and had to install a bunch of Python modules that didn’t appear on the standard Ubuntu repos.

Python has a very easy package manager of it’s own called easy tools which is found in the python-setuptools package. But this isn’t everything you need, you’ll receive a lot of errors when trying to use easy tools such as –

msgpack/_msgpack.c:4:20: fatal error: Python.h: No such file or directory
compilation terminated.
error: Setup script exited with error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

In order to resolve these errors you’ll need to ensure you have g++ installed as well as the python header and static library files. These two packages are called g++ and python2.7-dev. Change the python version depending on your preference or download the python-all-dev package.