Introduction

For the purposes of claiming forks with the bitcoin_fork_claimer tool, you will need to have a Python 2.7 environment ready. If you are running some variety of Linux, the chances are that you already have this by default. This guide will help you confirm that much.

This guide will use Ubuntu 16.04 for the screenshot examples, but the steps should be quite adaptable for any Linux sytem.

Do I Have Python 2.7?

The first step is to open the terminal application. In Ubuntu 16.04, you can do so by going to the main menu in the top right corner, and typing the word terminal into the search box:

It should launch and look something like this:

In the terminal, type in the following, but do not press enter:

python

It should look like this:

Now, press the Tab key twice and some text should appear like this:

If no text appears, it is likley that no version of Python is installed on the system and you should proceed to the next section. The contents of the text are possible commands that are excutable in the terminal. If you see python2.7 in the list - good news! You are done. If not, you have to install it which is covered in the next section.

To find the exact version of Python 2.7 available, you can finish typing the line in the terminal as:

python2.7 --version

press Enter. It should look something like this:

Any version of Python 2.7.x should be fine for use with the bitcoin_fork_claimer.

If I Don't Have Python 2.7, How Do I Install?

In both the Debian apt package management system, the package to install is named python2.7.

You can install it by typing in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install python2.7

and press: Enter

In the Red Hat yum package management system, the package to install is named python27.

You can install it by typing:

yum install -y python27

and pressing: Enter with root privileges in the terminal application.

After installing, you can validate it with the same method as in the previous section.

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