title: Creating a Portable Python (local install) for Linux
body: <p>I'm looking to create the following:</p>
  
  <p>A portable version of python that can be run on any system (with any previous version of python or no python installed) and have it pre-configured with various python packages (ie, django, lxml, pysqlite, etc)</p>
  
  <p>The closest I've found to the above is <a href="http://pypi.python.org/pypi/virtualenv">virtualenv</a>, but this only goes so far.</p>
  
  <p>If I package up a nice virtualenv for python on one machine, it contains sym links to a lot of the libraries it needs.  I can take those sym links and convert them to their actual files, but if I try to move this entire directory to another machine, I get seg fault after seg fault.</p>
  
  <p>To launch python on a different machine, I'm using:</p>
  
  <pre><code>LD_LIBRARY_PATH=lib/ ./bin/python
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and in lib/ I have all of the shared libraries I copied from the original machine.  The problem here is these shared libraries might rely on other shared libraries that I'm not including, so executing this on other linux distros does not work.  Probably due to it falling back on older shared libaries installed on the system that do not work with what I copied over.</p>
  
  <p>Anyone have an idea on how to get this working?  Is this even possible?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong></p>
  
  <p>To clarify, the desired outcome is to create a tar.gz of a python binary and associated packages (django, lxml, pysqlite, etc) that can be extracted and run on any linux based system, ie (ubuntu 8.04, redhat 5, suse 11, etc), all 32bit distros, where the locally installed version of python doesn't impact what's in the tar.gz.</p>