I had the same problem but it was with Windows 7. Following the last point called Running Custom Applications in http://docs.qgis.org/2.8/en/docs/pyqgis_developer_cookbook/intro.html I solved it.
You will need to tell your system where to search for QGIS libraries and appropriate Python modules if they are not in a well-known location — otherwise Python will complain:
>>> import qgis.core
ImportError: No module named qgis.core
This can be fixed by setting the PYTHONPATH environment variable. In the following commands, qgispath should be replaced with your actual QGIS installation path:
on Linux: export PYTHONPATH=/qgispath/share/qgis/python
on Windows: set PYTHONPATH=c:\qgispath\python
The path to the PyQGIS modules is now known, however they depend on qgis_core and qgis_gui libraries (the Python modules serve only as wrappers). Path to these libraries is typically unknown for the operating system, so you get an import error again (the message might vary depending on the system):
>>> import qgis.core
ImportError: libqgis_core.so.1.5.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Fix this by adding the directories where the QGIS libraries reside to search path of the dynamic linker:
on Linux: export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/qgispath/lib
on Windows: set PATH=C:\qgispath;%PATH%
These commands can be put into a bootstrap script that will take care of the startup. When deploying custom applications using PyQGIS, there are usually two possibilities:
require user to install QGIS on his platform prior to installing your application. The application installer should look for default locations of QGIS libraries and allow user to set the path if not found. This approach has the advantage of being simpler, however it requires user to do more steps.
package QGIS together with your application. Releasing the application may be more challenging and the package will be larger, but the user will be saved from the burden of downloading and installing additional pieces of software.
The two deployment models can be mixed - deploy standalone application on Windows and Mac OS X, for Linux leave the installation of QGIS up to user and his package manager.