Installing Pelican and Mercurial on lubuntu

This post provides a step-by-step guide to manually install Pelican on the bare VirtualBox lubuntu image. You probably want to install it on your own machine as well for any serious work. In most cases, this should be easier than for lubuntu. The key is to make sure you have Python 2.x and the python package manager pip available. Then it should be as simple as running

pip install pelican markdown

as root or super-user.

We also use Mercurial as version control software. Please refer to the Mercurial webpage for downloads and installation instructions for your machine. On most Linux systems, it is usually best to trust the package manager and use something like

sudo apt-get install mercurial

Obtain virtual machine

Install VirtualBox on your system (if you have not done so before), download the lubuntu image, and add to VirtualBox. Refer to the VirtualBox post for further guidance on how to setup VirtualBox.

Install make gcc

Make is needed for the guest installations. We also use make with pelican for convenience (more on that later)

sudo apt-get install make gcc

Installing gcc

Install Guest additions by injecting the Host Additions CD and run the following command in the cd subdirectory

cd /media/feeg6003/<NAME OF VBOXADDITIONS CD>
sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

Installing guest additions

This should take a minute or two. Reboot the virtual machine after installation of the guest additions.

Installing Pelican

Hint: Make sure that you are not using python 3.

Python version

We need to manually install the python package manager on lubuntu as this is not bundled with python prior to version 2.7.9. First obtain the installer script using wget

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py

and then install the package manager (pip) as super-user

sudo python get-pip.py

Install pip

Finally, once pip is available, pelican (with markdown extension) can be installed

sudo pip install pelican markdown

Install pip

Installing Mercurial

We use Mercurial as version control software for the blocks post repository.

Use the linux package manager to install mercurial

 sudo apt-get install mercurial meld

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