Python can be pain to maintain on your own, especially if you require up-to-date packages. To get around this, there are a number of Python distributions that bundle packages. These work independent of the installation provided on your operating systems. The largest two are Enthought Canopy and Anaconda. With a (free) academic license, you can install either in your own ICS home directory or your laptops.

If you don't want to use the Enthough installation discussed below, you can also hijack Volker's personal Anaconda installation. To do so, simply append

export PATH=/home/ics/volker/Anaconda/bin:$PATH

to your the .bashrc file in home directory.

For convenience, we provide a site-wide installation of Enthought Canopy on the zBox. It comes with the most wanted packages (IPython/Numpy/Scipy/Matplotlib/Scikit). You can use it as follows.

1) Create/edit the .bashrc file in your home and add

VIRTUAL_ENV_DISABLE_PROMPT=1 source /zbox/opt/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/bin/activate

2) If you are compiling stuff, you will also need to add

export LIBRARY_PATH=/zbox/opt/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/lib:$LIBRARY_PATH

3) Create/edit the .bash_profile file in your home and add

if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then
        . ~/.bashrc
fi

4) Log out, log in again. Then type (in the shell) “which ipython”. It should return

/zbox/opt/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/bin/ipython

Also note:

• Pynbody is installed for the SPH-junkies among you.
• Pymses (with amrviewer) is also compiled. To use these, you need to add more lines to your .bashrc

PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/zbox/opt/pymses_4.0.0
export PYTHONPATH

PATH=$PATH:/zbox/opt/pymses_4.0.0/bin
export PATH

• If you find this line somewhere in your .bashrc, .bash_profile, or .profile in your home directory, you should comment it out.

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

If you have trouble and/or need more packages, feel free to mail Volker.

If you use another shell (zsh, tcsh, …), you can likely figure out the appropriate steps yourself.