For my non-developer readers: This is a technical post, and it might make your head explode. Be careful.

TLDR:

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is very different from the flavors of Linux that I’m accustomed to working with (Debian/Ubuntu), and I ran into quite a bit of trouble getting Django installed. I can’t install packages myself, so it was even more slow going as every time I discovered I was missing something, I had to have a sysadmin do it for me.

Here’s the quick list of the packages that will get Django up and running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Notice I’ve included MySQL. The database package you need may be different, and I’ll leave it up to you if you use something other than MySQL.

• python-mysql
• python-devel (Necessary for setuptools/distutils/easy_install later.)
• python-imaging (The “PIL”. You may need this later.)
• mysql-devel (For getting an up to date MySQLdb module, should you need it.)
• python-xml
• pyxml

For reference, here is the full package listing for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2.

I wrote this just in case someone was unfortunate enough to have to go through this same process. Hopefully your search engine of choice will guide you here, and the next few hours of your life will be slightly less stressful than they could have been.

Read the details of my adventure “after the break”… (more…)