I'm currently linuxless, but since I have access to a Windows XP laptop I thought I'd try a few little experiments. I'm probably not going to pursue this to far, as at this stage in the game it doesn't make a lot of sense to bring another, radically different, platform into the mix.

Running mod_python on Windows (XP) is actually quite simple:

• install Apache (Windows MSI Binary 2.0.X)
  
• install Python; I like ActiveState's version from my Windows versions (Windows MSI 2.4.X)
• install mod_python from here; make sure you pick the correct matching version for Apache and Python!

On Windows I find it fairly useful to install everything the default way. Configuring this is simplicity:

• edit httpd.conf (there's probably a start menu option for this)
  
• add "LoadModule python_module modules/mod_python.so" in the LoadModules section
• restart Apache
• test (the Directory version works out of the box with the appropriate path adjustment)

BlogMatrix uses a lot of shell scripts; mixing this together with Windows Python (not Cygwin Python) is going to be a challenge, as the way paths are handled is different.

We have a really neat demo of importing microformats into BlogMatrix. However, we can't show you. Why?

• Apache compiles with its own version of Expat
• mod_python compiles against Apache
• Python compiles with its own version of Expat
• these two different versions of Expat are not compatible
• therefore, all libraries that parse XML cause Apache/mod_python to core dump

We'll have to recompile Apache against Python's Expat and go from there. This will cause a short period of downtime, so we won't be doing this for a little while yet.