virtualenv

If you want to merely test out the library, you can do that easily in a virtual python environment created with virtualenv.

NB:* You need a build environment for your platform set up as described in the Installation section.

Setup

The following steps set up an evironment:

• create a directory and initialize the environment

  $ mkdir pwwtest
  $ virtualenv pwwtest
  

• install the required packages

  $ pwwtest/bin/pip install numpy
  $ pwwtest/bin/pip install PIL
  $ pwwtest/bin/pip install matplotlib
  $ pwwtest/bin/pip install pygraphviz
  $ pwwtest/bin/pip install javabridge
  

• as an alternative, you can also use all currently installed packages on your host system in the virtual environment. For this, you have to have to all the required packages installed on your host already (see Installation section). You can create the virtual environment as follows:

  $ virtualenv --system-site-packages pwwtest
  

Troubleshooting

• You may need to install the header files for the following libraries for the compilations to succeed:

  • freetype
  • graphviz
  • png

• Before you can install matplotlib, you may have to upgrade your distribute library as follows:

  $  bin/easy_install -U distribute
  

• On Ubuntu, follow this post to install all the required dependencies for PIL:

  $ sudo apt-get build-dep python-imaging
  

• To enable support for PIL on Ubuntu, see this post:

  $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libfreetype.so /usr/lib/
  $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib/
  $ sudo ln -s /usr/lib/`uname -i`-linux-gnu/libz.so /usr/lib/
  

• Based on this post do the following to install matplotlib with tkinter support:

  sudo apt install tk-dev
  /my/virtualenv/dir/bin/pip --no-cache-dir install -U --force-reinstall matplotlib