I'm having a tough time installing Python 3.13.7 from the official website. I managed to download the gzipped source tarball, but when I looked at the README instructions, it said to run commands like './configure', 'make', 'make test', and 'sudo make install'. I tried these commands without success, getting 'no such file or directory'. After extracting the file into a folder in my home directory titled 'python', I attempted to run the commands from there but still faced issues. I even tried running an 'install' command on the files directly but it yielded no results, and using 'run in konsole' just returned 'no input file specified'. The problem is that I'm new to Linux and haven't used the terminal much, and my professor requires us to download Python directly from python.org. Any advice on what I might be doing wrong? By the way, I'm using a Steam Deck, which is mostly based on Arch Linux.
1 Answer
Are you running something like Ubuntu or Fedora? It might be easier to just install Python using your package manager since it's likely already in the repositories. For example, if you're on Ubuntu, you could try 'apt search python' and then 'sudo apt install python3' or 'dnf' if you're on Fedora. But if you're set on installing from the source, make sure you've extracted the tarball and navigated into that folder before running the commands.
I'm actually using a Steam Deck, which I think is a variant of Arch Linux.