Download the release

Starting with the Python 2.4 releases the Windows Python installer is being distributed as a Microsoft Installer (.msi) file. To use this, the Windows system must support Microsoft Installer 2.0. Just save the installer file, Python-2.5.msi, to your local machine, then double-click python-2.5.msi to find out if your machine supports MSI. If it doesn't, you'll need to install Microsoft Installer first. Many other packages (such as Word and Office) also include MSI, so you may already have it on your system. If not, you can download it freely from Microsoft for Windows 95, 98 and Me and for Windows NT 4.0 and 2000. Windows XP and later already have MSI; many older machines will already have MSI installed.

The new format installer allows for automated installation and many other shiny new features. There are also separate installers for Win64-Itanium users (on XP/2003 64-bit Itanium Edition) - Python-2.5.ia64.msi and for Win64 users on AMD64 machines (on XP/2003/Vista x64 Edition) - Python-2.5.amd64.msi.

Windows users may also be interested in Mark Hammond's pywin32 package, available from Sourceforge. pywin32 adds a number of Windows-specific extensions to Python, including COM support and the Pythonwin IDE.

Users of Mac OS X 10.3 and later can install a universal binary (suitable for both PowerPC and Intel machines) from python-2.5-macosx.dmg . Download to the desktop and open the .dmg file to install.

All others should download either python-2.5.tgz or python-2.5.tar.bz2, the source archive. The tar.bz2 is considerably smaller, so get that one if your system has the appropriate tools to deal with it. Unpack it with tar -zxvf Python-2.5.tgz (or bzcat Python-2.5.tar.bz2 | tar -xf -). Change to the Python-2.5 directory and run the "./configure", "make", "make install" commands to compile and install Python.

Since this is a new version of Python, you may want to use the "make altinstall" command instead of "make install" - this will install a "python2.5" binary without touching the existing "python" binary.

The source archive is also suitable for Windows users who feel the need to build their own version.

What's New?

• See some of the highlights of the Python 2.5 release.
• Andrew Kuchling's What's New in Python 2.5 describes the most visible changes since Python 2.4 in more detail.
• PEP 356 has information on a bunch of the new features added in 2.5, as well as pointers to the relevant PEPs.
• A detailed list of the changes in Python 2.5 can be found in the release notes, or the Misc/NEWS file in the source distribution.
• IDLE has its own release notes, or see the Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt file in the source distribution.
• For the full list of changes, you can poke around in Subversion.

Documentation

The documentation has also been updated:

• Browse HTML on-line
• Download using HTTP.
• Documentation is available in Windows Help (.chm) format - Python25.chm.

Files, MD5 checksums, signatures and sizes

bc1b74f90a472a6c0a85481aaeb43f95 Python-2.5.tgz (11019675 bytes, signature)

ddb7401e711354ca83b7842b733825a3 Python-2.5.tar.bz2 (9357099 bytes, signature)

33fffe927e4a84aa728d7a47165b2059 python-2.5.msi (10695680 bytes, signature)

c9ebc47dfab4fdc78d895ed6ab715db0 python-2.5.amd64.msi (10889216 bytes, signature)

dec95012739692625939e3ec6572fa5f python-2.5.ia64.msi (12986368 bytes, signature)

9ea85494251357970d83a023658fddc7 python-2.5-macosx.dmg (18749464 bytes, signature)

d8bfc10c7fd6505271ef5c755999c7cc Python25.chm (4160038 bytes, signature)

The signatures above were generated with GnuPG using release manager Anthony Baxter's public key which has a key id of 6A45C816.