Python is a modern high-level language suitable for a wide variety of programming tasks. Open source versions of the Python interpreter are freely available for all major operating systems. There are two main versions of Python, 2.x and 3.x, and there are a few significant differences between them, so they are not completely interchangeable. The latest version of the 2.x branch is 2.7 (at the moment), and there will be no more major releases in this branch. The 3.x branch is being actively developed. For GDAL, however, you are forced to use an older version of Python if you need to use a third party module that has not been updated to work with Python 3.x The major disadvantage of Python 3 is the lack of support for third-party libraries. Therefore, we have used the version 2 of Python for our OSA installation. The latest version of Python 2 can be downloaded from here.

You can verify the python installation by executing the following command in a terminal window:

>python --version

Python comes with a command-line utility called pip, which can be used to install many extra modules because it’s usually the easiest way to do it. The pip utility lives in the scripts folder inside your Python installation directory. Because this is a command-line tool, you need to use it from a terminal window or command prompt. To install a module using pip, you do something like this:

>pip install module_name