Monday, May 13, 2013

Notes on installing IPython

Notes to self on installing IPython on Puppy Linux:

First: when the site says the QTconsole is "built on QT", that does in fact mean that QT has to be installed first.

Second: QT's "configure" script has to be called with the '-qt-xcb' option (which tells the compiler to use its own version of some library or other).

Third: 'make'ing QT takes a couple of hours. Thank Eris it compiled successfully, or else I'd have kicked something.

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Fourth: I spoke too soon. QT's 'make install' terminated with an error the first time I ran it. This is a rare but known bug, and it fixes itself magically by running 'make -j4 install' instead.

Fifth: After installing QT, figure out where the 'qmake' program lives. For me, it was /usr/local/Qt-X.Y.Z/bin. If you're like me and that's not on your path, you'll need that location later.

Sixth: Install SIP. Now, PIP/the PyPI knows about SIP, but can't install it automatically because it uses a weird build procedure. Instead of the usual
$python setup.py install
instead you do
$python configure.py --options
$make
$make install
after you've downloaded and unpacked the tarball.

Seventh: same for PySide. Oh, and don't waste time with PyQt5. Apparently IPython's QT stuff needs 4 anyway. As in, it's hard-coded in.

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