I tried installing yt-1.5 again now that I had python-dev on my system. Got the same error.

Oof, I am sorry to hear that. I'll see if I can replicate the problem on my machine at home, and then get back to you with what I find.

Please suggest something for my other problem 2.) about not "iyt" in the old installation. Here is the successful old-yt install log and the src contents that were actually downloaded by the script for that installation.

Okay, iyt is actually a rather simple extension to the functionality of IPython. (IPython can be "easy_install"'d if you don't have it already.) It is not necessary, but it does help things out. You can get the functionality by: $ ipython -pylab from yt.mods import * There are a couple other functions that I've added to iyt, but they are not terribly useful just yet. Please note that you need PYTHONPATH set correctly here, or else the "from yt.mods import *" line won't work for you. I hope this works out -- but if it doesn't, you can do it all from the regular python interpreter, too, you just have to plot non-interactively. (I typically do this, myself -- other people on the list use IPython, but it is not my primary entry point to yt.) You can plot non-interactively in one window and view the plots in the other; I've found gqview to be a good application for this on linux, or even something like firefox!

Meantime I'll see if I can install the whole yt-1.5 by hand.

Good luck, and please let me know if it works for you. It should be fine if you ahve HDF5, matplotlib, numpy all from the operating system. -Matt