Hacking Gmail

214 Part III — Conquering Gmail

If you are using an RPM-based distribution — Red Hat, Mandrake, or SuSE, for

example — you can get a package’s version number by using rpm. Open a terminal

window, and type the following command:

rpm -q python

This should give a result similar to the following:

python-2.3.0

If the version number is too low, you should download the update from

http://python.org/download/and follow the instructions there.

If you’re running a DEB-based distribution — Debian or Knoppix, for example —

use apt-cacheby opening a terminal and typing the following:

apt-cache show python

Again, this should give a message showing the version number. Go to http://

python.org/download/if the number is below 2.3.

If you’re not using DEB or RPM, then you need to ask for the version number

from Python directly. Again, open the terminal window, and type python.

Figure 16-1 shows the result.

FIGURE16-1: Python showing and telling

(This screenshot, the cunning amongst you will have noticed, was done on

an Apple, not a Linux box. For the sake of the Python version, this makes no

difference.)

To exit Python, you have to press Ctrl+D.