One way to achieve this would be to add a ~/.profile file with a line like this:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

This would result in /usr/local/bin being listed twice. It wouldn’t hurt but it’s not pretty either.

If you look at /etc/profile, you will see that the initial value of PATH is set by path_helper(8).

The right way to change to order of default paths is to edit /etc/paths. It contains one path per line, in descending order. Mine looks like this:

/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

Python comes with batteries included, but sometimes, battery power is not enough. Thankfully, there are countless packages available for use. Given that there “should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it,” using Python packages can be quite intimidating. The documentation of your package might say to download, unzip und run python setup.py install. Meet distutils. Or just do easy_install MyPackage, which is uses setuptools. But then you hear that setuptools is superseeded by distribute and instead of easy_install, you should use pip. And then there is virtualenv, which is awesome, but can be even more awesome with virtualenvwrapper. What a mess!

My conclusion: use distribute, pip, virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper.

You can download the slides or view them with Slideshare:

To find out, just start an EC2 micro instance*. Don’t forget to stop it. After some time, go to the account activity page and click on “expand all services”. You should see something like this:

* This will cost you a few cents if you don’t have a free usage tier.