I'm pleased to announce multipy, a shell utility that helps you install and manage multiple local Python installations. It's available at https://github.com/akheron/multipy It downloads source tarballs for the newest version of any Python X.Y, compiles the source, and installs everything under a single directory hierarchy. By default, the install location is ~/multipy. distribute is also installed along with each Python version, as well as an activate script (in the spirit of virtualenv) for easier shell integration. multipy is a single shell script. It requires a POSIX compliant shell, wget, tar and gzip to download and extract source tarballs, and a compiler, development headers and libraries to compile Python. No existing Python installation is required. multipy should work on any Unix-like system that Python can be compiled on. Python versions 2.4 and up can be installed (including all 3.x releases). Usage examples: Install Python 2.7 and 3.2: $ multipy install 2.7 3.2 Install all supported Python versions (2.4 and up): $ multipy install all List installed Python versions: $ multipy list Remove Python 2.7: $ multipy remove 2.7 Use a custom installation directory: $ multipy -b /path/to/somewhere install 3.2 Tweak PATH to "activate" the local Python 2.5: $ . $(multipy activate 2.5) After this, e.g. python and easy_install can be used without an absolute path. To leave this mode, use deactivate. Regards, Petri Lehtinen