Developing Plone on Ubuntu 9.04 with virtualenv

Technical notes to overcome some obstacles

Ubuntu 9.04 "Jaunty Jackalope" removed python 2.4 libraries from the distribution, which are necessary to run Zope/Plone.

To work in a more defined environment, where other as the system libraries are installed for a specific python, people use virtualenv.

Install virtualenv, python-2.4 from the distribution repository.

Create a 

virtualenv -p python2.4 --no-site-packages myappdir

In myappdir,

source bin/active

sets some environment variables.

I use zsh with the "nounset"-Option, which the script doesn't work with, so I had to

unsetopt nounset

Install ipython or zc.buildout or other eggs you need

easy-install ipython

PIL aka python-imaging is not longer available in a a 2.4 version in Ubuntu 9.04, but contains a lot of binary code so I didn't want to build it myself.  3 options: Install an old python-imaging-2.4-package,

Install it by hand - easy_install --find-links http://download.zope.org/distribution PILwoTK or untar and python setup.py install and before that, you have to install some other image handling libs to get all the features as explained here  http://sam.stainsby.id.au/blog/?p=28

sudo apt-get install libjpeg-dev libfreetype6-dev (zlib?)

or. what I did, install the current package and link to it from the virtualenv.

In myappdir/lib/site-packages

ln -s /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL PIL

Python complains about differing C API versions, but it seems to work.

This all looks less than perfect, esp. the PIL link hack.

Too many packaging tools.