[SciPy-user] Install scipy on ubnutu 8.10

[Nathan Bell]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2008 at 3:01 PM, Xavier Gnata <xavier.gnata at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I have installed an ubuntu 8.10 within a kvm image.
> The goal is to write an as simple as possible procedure to compile
> scipy on this distribution.
> I would like to be able to compile scipy only after having installed
> some packages. No tricks.

Hi Xavier, I think this is a great idea.  I have sold other people on
numpy/scipy, but myriad BLAS/LAPACK/fortran combinations makes the
installation process unpleasant for new users.

> I have one issue:
> scipy/sparse/linalg/dsolve/umfpack/umfpack.i:192: Error: Unable to
> find 'umfpack.h'
> I have installed libsuitesparse-dev providing /usr/include/suitesparse/umfpack.h
> Of course, I can solve this with a symlink but it is very ugly.
> It looks like there is something to fix in scipy auto-detection
> because this "usr/include/suitesparse/umfpack.h" should be detected
> and used.

The "right" way to do this is to put a [umfpack] section in site.cfg
http://projects.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-dev/2007-April/006910.html

Ideally, auto-detection would always include knowledge about where the
major distributions put these files.  Keep in mind that scipy's
support for UMFPACK is deprecated in 0.7 and has been moved to a
scikit.

>
> Once again, my goal is to end up with something like:
> 1) apt-get install "the correct list of packages"
> 2) compile/install scipy svn *wthout any extra config*.
> 3) you have a nice scipy installed and you can even  check that using
> scipy.test() (ok ok it is an svn version so if you get some errors
> please report them ;))
>

For 2) you can either improve the auto-detection (I don't know how
myself) or simply not use UMFPACK.  The danger is that someone might
already have libsuitesparse-dev installed, so fixing the
auto-detection is probably a better approach.

Anyway, I'm eager to see this information become available.  Do you
plan to provide instructions for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions?  In
8.04 I believe there were some differences in the availability of BLAS
libraries between the two.

-- 
Nathan Bell wnbell at gmail.com
http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/~wnbell/