'make patchcheck' will do whitespace checking because that's hard to eyeball (although many editors/IDEs do support making it visible nowadays).  We don't use any other checking tools other than eyeballs, since not all of the existing code conforms to PEP7/8 and for various reasons we aren't going to update most of the old code to conform.

So, if I'm running an ubuntu virtual machine under VMWare Fusion (which I already have set up) I should be able to get the tests to run?  Or does it need to be RedHat (or presumably CentOS)?