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PySteamGameMover – simple python app to move steam games from one library to another

Screen shot of Steam Game mover menu screen
Screen shot of Steam Game mover menu screen

I made this simple Python program for Windows which I’ve released under the GNU public licence to fill a gap missing in Steam, the ability to move an individual game from one steam library to another.

Close Steam down, point this script at your old and new steam libraries, choose the game you want to move from the list and hey presto your game is in the new location.

Great for if you need to free up space on your drive but you don’t want to move your entire library to another location.

Use this at your own risk, it’s only been tested on my machine and I’ve only covered a few things that could go wrong.

Any assistance in improving the quality of the code would also be greatly appreciated.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/pysteamgamemover/

Download steam-gamemove.py if you already have Python 3.5+ installed, if not download the precompiled version at /dist/steam-gamemover-v0-1.zip.

You may need to download and install the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015 (https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=48145) if you wish to run the precompiled version on Windows prior to Windows 10.

Download pySteamGameMover

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Python on Debian from sourcecode update (altinstalling development branch 3.2 rc2)

Just though I’d post an update on my earlier post about installing Python 3.1.3 from source code on Debian Linux.

Although I wouldn’t encourage you to use it as your main environment some of you may be interested in trying out the latest development branch of Python to test new features or to help with finding and reporting bugs.

As of writing this, the lattest release is 3.2 rc2.

http://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.2/Python-3.2rc2.tgz

If you’d like to test out the development branch without interfering with your main install of Python you can use Pythons ‘altinstall’ feature.

Follow my previous guide on compiling Python 3.1.3 and when you reach the final stage instead of running;

debian:/#make && make install

Run the following instead;  (please note you will need appropriate permission to write to system folders to run either ‘make install’ or ‘make altinstall’.)

debian:/#make && make altinstall

Instead of installing the Python binary under the default name of  ‘python3’, ‘altinstall’ will incorporate the full version number in to the binary name leaving the original stable branch binary undisturbed.

You can run the ‘altinstall’ by typing;

debian:/#python3.2

Link to my previous guide:
Installing Python 3.1.3 from source, the full works (Debian Linux 5.x lenny)

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Installing Python 3.1.3 from source, the full works (Debian Linux 5.x lenny)

So previously I’d posted about getting Python 3.1 installed from source on OS X. This time I’ll be talking about installing Python 3.1.3 on Debian Linux 5.x lenny.

Although this guide is specific to Debian lenny it should be applicable to other Linux distros’ based on Debian such as Ubuntu and can probably be adapted to work on other distros’.

First you’ll need to download the Python source code, you can do so by following this link. Python 3.1.3

You can also download and uncompress the file by running the following commands from the terminal

debian:/# wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.1.3/Python-3.1.3.tar.bz2

debian:/# tar -xvf ./Python-3.1.3.tar.bz2

To build programs from source you’ll need to install gcc and associated files which can be done as follows;

debian:/# apt-get install build-essential

The first time I tried to compile the Python source-code I was presented with the following output….

Python build finished, but the necessary bits to build these modules were not found:
_curses            _curses_panel      _dbm
_gdbm              _hashlib           _sqlite3
_ssl               _tkinter           bz2
readline           zlib
To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module’s name.

I should expect on most fairly default installs of Debian you’ll also be missing the same components. If you wanted you could run Python as it is but you’ll be missing many important features.

If you follow the rest of this guide I’ll show you how to install all the required files for a fully featured Python build.

To install the missing components you should run the following from the terminal;

debian:/# apt-get install zlib1g-dev libncurses5-dev libreadline5-dev libssl-dev libbz2-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev libgdbm-dev

Now you have all the required components we can try to compile the code.

Navigate through to the directory where you extracted the Python files and run the following.

debian:/#./configure && make && make install

If everything has gone well Python 3.1.3 should now be compiled and installed.

you can run the Python interpreter by running the following;

debian:/#python3

I hope this guide has been helpful. Happy coding.

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TKinter – Delving in to the world of Python GUI’s.

So today I’ve set myself the task of getting to grips with GUI’s in Python.

I’ve started as I always do with a google search and I now have about 50 tabs open, waiting for me to pluck up the courage to start delving through the mass of information and trying to sort the cruft from invaluable.

So far I’ve found that I can forget about wxWidgets as there is no sign of Python 3 integration in the near future. This leaves me it seems with only TKinter and possibly QT4/PyQT…….

Anyone know different?

Stay tuned for my next blog, where I’ll detail what I’ve found and which websites I found useful.

I’ll also soon blog about why I’ve decided to go with Python 3, rather than the more mainstream and accepted 2.xx.

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Installing Python 3.1 from Source code on OS X with readline

So I recently took it apon myself to try installing Python 3.1 from source code on my Mac laptop.

As soon as ‘make’ had finished I was presented with a message telling me that several libraries which would be required for extra functionality were missing.

One of these was ‘readline’. If you don’t know what ‘readline’ does, it provides the functionality inside the Python interpreter similar to that in Bash or Doskey. Just to mention one of the small but important feature it allows you to be able to press the up and down arrow keys to scroll through previous input. If you intended on using the Python interpreter interactively this is pretty much an essential.

OS X does not contain the GNU readline library and instead uses a replacement called editline due to licencing issues.

It’s been a few days since I performed the install but I hope my memory serves me correctly in detailing the steps necessary to get Python compiled and using the readline library. Please leave comments to the contrary if you believe I’ve missed out any step and I will try to plug-in the blanks.

Please note, to compile programs from source on OS X you will need to install X Code from Apple. This is the Apple development environment which bundles their IDE, libraries and such along with the GNU C compiler GCC.

The first thing I needed to do was to download the ‘readline’ library. I did so by downloading readline-6.1.0.tar.gz from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/readline/.

Once downloaded and extracted, I opened up the terminal and navigated to the ‘~/readlin-6.1.0/readline/’ directory.

Here I ran the command ‘./configure’, this checks your environment for prerequisites required for the compilation and then configures the make file for the build as appropriate.

Once this has completed successfully, you should run now run the command ‘make’. Again this should be done from the terminal in the same directory as before. Your computer will now be compiling the ‘readline’ library.

Presuming all steps have been successful so far you can now type, ‘sudo make install’, again from the terminal in the same directory. You will require admin permissions for this due to files being copied to protected directories. You have now installed the ‘readline’ library we have just compiled.

Now that we have built and installed the library, you can go back to your Python source code folder and compile and install Python 3.1 as instructed in the Python documentation.

All going well, you will now notice that at the end of the compile it will no longer complain about ‘readline’ being missing and your Python interpreter, will now work as intended with the correct functionality.