Use the Free Enthought Python Distribution (EPDFree) to install the necesssary Python packages on Windows. Enthought sponsors much of the development for NumPy and SciPy. EPDFree is a bundled binary distribution of Python including a set of useful packages.
To download EPD go to the EPDFree download page. Double click on the the .msi file, and choose to install for All Users. If you are using Vista and the installation may abort giving an error about insufficient privileges. In this case, open a terminal as an administrator (right click and run as administrator) and then run the the .msi file from the terminal command line.
To check the installation has completed successfully try running ipython by either selecting the PyLab application from the Start menu, or typing on the command prompt:
C:\Python27\Scripts\ipython.exe --pylab
To exit IPython enter:
exit()
Once you’ve installed EPDFree you can install the additional packages listed in the Python requirements section. Open a terminal and copy and paste the lines below one at a time, checking that each one works. The program outputs may contain various “warnings”, but watch for “errors” and look at the end to see if a successful installation was reported:
cd C:\Python27\Scripts
easy_install.exe --upgrade pip
pip.exe install --upgrade distribute
pip.exe install asciitable
pip.exe install atpy
pip.exe install aplpy
To install the remainder of the packages below a C-compiler is required. Setting up a C-compiler on Windows is currently beyond the scope of these instructions. They are not essential for the course, however, and if you don’t have a C-compiler set up you can skip them for now:
pip.exe install pyregion
pip.exe install pyfits
pip.exe install pywcs
pip.exe install http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/vo-0.6.tar.gz
pip.exe install http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/coords-0.37.tar.gz
To do a very basic test whether you meet the requirements and have a functioning core scientific Python installation, do the following to check version numbers. First on the command line check the version numbers of python and ipython:
python -V
ipython --version
Then run ipython from the command line with the --pylab flag:
ipython --pylab
and inside ipython run the following python commands:
import numpy
import scipy
import scipy.linalg
import pylab as plt
print numpy.__version__
print scipy.__version__
print matplotlib.__version__
x = numpy.linspace(0, 20, 100)
plt.plot(x, sin(x))
print scipy.linalg.eig([[1, 2], [3, 4]])
They should run without errors. The version numbers should meet the requirements and finally you should see a plot of a sine wave.
To check the other required packages, do the following also from within ipython:
import asciitable
import atpy
import aplpy
import pyfits
import pywcs
If all the above commands ran without errors, you’ve installed everything successfully!