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-cache by 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.
FIGURE 16-1: 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.