After losing so, so much in a catastrophic hard drive failure, I've found it difficult to get my development environment back up and running. Time was, I could open a terminal and everything was ready to go: command completion, test suite, every version of Python, BeautifulSoup, lxml, Sphinx...I had everything set up and functional. Now I'm starting from scratch and it's daunting.

So, to stay focused I'm going to post updates as the recovery progresses. So far I've gotten Python 2.4 through 3.3 installed on Ubuntu and I've installed git. Next up: configuring tox to run the unit tests across all of the Python versions instead of writing another convoluted shell script.

It'd be nice if I could get readline working for Python 2.4 through 2.6. I found out that the lower Python versions didn't have command histories and history searches and blew a gasket. That is unacceptable because I don't rely on print statements for debugging and instead use pdb like an adult, so command histories and searches are required. Not a top priority, but still a big deal.