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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.
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:$LIBRARY_PATH
3) Create/edit the .bash_profile file in your home and add
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc fi
4) Log out, log in again. Then type (in the shell) “which ipython”. It should return
/zbox/opt/Enthought/Canopy_64bit/User/bin/ipython
Also note:
PYTHONPATH=$PYTHONPATH:/zbox/opt/pymses_4.0.0 export PYTHONPATH PATH=$PATH:/zbox/opt/pymses_4.0.0/bin export PATH
# If not running interactively, don't do anything [ -z "$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.