Installation

Linux

Anaconda

Installation is easiest if you already have a working Anaconda installation. In this case, simply navigate to the root directory of the project where the setup script setup.py is and execute python setup.py install.

Non-Anaconda

If you don’t have Anaconda, there may be some additional complications. This package depends upon scipy, matplotlib, and h5py, which have some external C-library dependencies. If you don’t have those python packages pre-installed, you may need the following libraries in order to build them when invoking the setup script:

  • scipy
    • LAPACK (liblapack-dev)
    • BLAS (libopenblas-dev)
    • Fortran compiler (gfortran)
  • h5py
    • HDF5 shared library with development headers (1.8.4 or newer, packaged as libhdf5-dev or similar).
  • matplotlib
    • freetype (libfreetype6-dev)

Once you have that installed you should be able to successfully run python setup.py install, although I can’t guarantee it. The code successfully builds on Travis-CI, and I only had to manually instruct it to install LAPACK, BLAS, a Fortran compiler, and HDF5.

Issues

Building seems to work fine with Python 2.7 when starting with a base Anaconda installation. When building with a minimal Python installation (i.e. in an environment created by conda create --name new_env python=2.7 or conda create --name new_env python=3, there seem to be problems building matplotlib. In Python 3 I get TypeError: unorderable types: str() < int() at the line reading if self.version < other.version:, and in Python 2 I get:

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -lnpymath