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In the best case, someone will have prepared a special version of the module distribution you want to install that is targeted specifically at your platform and is installed just like any other software on your platform. For example, the module developer might make an executable installer available for Windows users, an RPM package for users of RPM-based Linux systems (Red Hat, SuSE, Mandrake, and many others), a Debian package for users of Debian-based Linux systems, and so forth.
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In that case, you would download the installer appropriate to your platform and do the obvious thing with it: run it if it's an executable installer, ``rpm --install`` it if it's an RPM, etc. You don't need to run Python or a setup script, you don't need to compile anything---you might not even need to read any instructions (although it's always a good idea to do so anyways).
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Of course, things will not always be that easy. You might be interested in a module distribution that doesn't have an easy-to-use installer for your platform. In that case, you'll have to start with the source distribution released by the module's author/maintainer. Installing from a source distribution is not too hard, as long as the modules are packaged in the standard way. The bulk of this document is about building and installing modules from standard source distributions.
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The new standard: Distutils
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If you download a module source distribution, you can tell pretty quickly if it was packaged and distributed in the standard way, i.e. using the Distutils. First, the distribution's name and version number will be featured prominently in the name of the downloaded archive, e.g. :file:`foo-1.0.tar.gz` or :file:`widget-0.9.7.zip`. Next, the archive will unpack into a similarly-named directory: :file:`foo-1.0` or :file:`widget-0.9.7`. Additionally, the distribution will contain a setup script :file:`setup.py`, and a file named :file:`README.txt` or possibly just :file:`README`, which should explain that building and installing the module distribution is a simple matter of running ::
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If all these things are true, then you already know how to build and install the modules you've just downloaded: Run the command above. Unless you need to install things in a non-standard way or customize the build process, you don't really need this manual. Or rather, the above command is everything you need to get out of this manual.
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Standard Build and Install
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As described in section :ref:`inst-new-standard`, building and installing a module distribution using the Distutils is usually one simple command::
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On Unix, you'd run this command from a shell prompt; on Windows, you have to open a command prompt window ("DOS box") and do it there; on Mac OS X, you open a :command:`Terminal` window to get a shell prompt.
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