SCons comes pre-packaged for installation on a number of systems, including Linux and Windows systems. You do not need to read this entire section, you should need to read only the section appropriate to the type of system you're running on.
SCons comes in RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) format, pre-built and ready to install on Red Hat Linux, Fedora, or any other Linux distribution that uses RPM. Your distribution may already have an SCons RPM built specifically for it; many do, including SUSE, Mandrake and Fedora. You can check for the availability of an SCons RPM on your distribution's download servers, or by consulting an RPM search site like http://www.rpmfind.net/ or http://rpm.pbone.net/.
If your distribution supports installation via yum, you should be able to install SCons by running:
# yum install scons
If your Linux distribution does not already have a specific SCons RPM file, you can download and install from the generic RPM provided by the SCons project. This will install the SCons script(s) in /usr/bin, and the SCons library modules in /usr/lib/scons.
To install from the command line, simply download the appropriate .rpm file, and then run:
# rpm -Uvh scons-2.1.0-1.noarch.rpm
Or, you can use a graphical RPM package manager. See your package manager application's documention for specific instructions about how to use it to install a downloaded RPM.
Debian Linux systems use a different package management format that also makes it very easy to install SCons.
If your system is connected to the Internet, you can install the latest official Debian package by running:
# apt-get install scons
SCons provides a Windows installer that makes installation extremely easy. Download the scons-2.1.0.win32.exe file from the SCons download page at http://www.scons.org/download.php. Then all you need to do is execute the file (usually by clicking on its icon in Windows Explorer). These will take you through a small sequence of windows that will install SCons on your system.