[SciPy-dev] Building numpy/scipy on RHEL5 OR CentOS5

[Michael Hearne]

David - You are correct - my problems _were_ with BLAS and LAPACK.  I 
didn't know about your repository  - I'll try those on another machine 
once I've worked through Phil's instructions.  I agree with you about 
RHEL and the up to date list of packages... as far as I can tell, you 
have to have your machine registered with RedHat to get the most 
up-to-date list of the "official" versions of the software.

My biggest problems with RHEL are:
1) that everything is several versions behind the latest and greatest, 
because Redhat intends this for an enterprise audience who wants 
guarantees of stable software
2) Because you have to pay to get RHEL, there isn't as large a community 
of volunteer users.  The FC stuff isn't very helpful, because most of it 
is a couple of generations ahead.

You can guess that RHEL was not my choice...

Thanks for the suggestions!

--Mike

David Cournapeau wrote:
> Michael Hearne wrote:
>   
>> I've been wrestling with installing scipy (in any form - binary, source, 
>> egg, rpm) on some RHEL5 machines that I am compelled to work with, and 
>> have failed miserably.   I noticed a thread a few months back about 
>> building scipy on CentOS 5, and noticed that at least one of the 
>> respondents indicated he'd had success.  As I understand it, CentOS 
>> strives for binary compatibility with RHEL, so I'm hopeful that CentOS 
>> solutions will work for me.
>>
>> Does anyone have (in order of preference):
>> 1) A CentOS/RHEL5 yum repository for scipy/numpy/(optionally matplotlib)
>> 2) CentOS/RHEL5 RPM's for scipy/numpy/(optionally matplotlib)
>> 3) A set of instructions for building scipy from source on either of 
>> these platforms?
>>
>> I'm getting a little desperate here - this is likely one of the  most 
>> difficult installs I've ever had to deal with.
>>   
>>     
> Hi Michael,
>
> If you don't tell us more, we won't be able to help you much. Installing
> numpy/scipy themselves is easy; their dependencies (BLAS/LAPACK) are
> not. One problem I have with CENTOS/RHEL, contrary to most other
> distributions, is the difficult to get an up-to-date list of available
> packages. Would you know where to find it ?
>
> Your two options are building from sources or binary packages:
>     - from sources: you need BLAS/LAPACK, and make sure the same fortran
> compiler is used for everything (g77 or gfortran; gfortran is best for
> RHEL5, because that's the default one I believe).
>     - from rpm: you could try ashigabou repositories
>
> http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ashigabou/CentOS_5/
>
> If it does not work, please let me know (I am the one who build the
> packages, and will fix any problems with them).
>
> cheers,
>
> David
>   

-- 
------------------------------------------------------
Michael Hearne
mhearne at usgs.gov
(303) 273-8620
USGS National Earthquake Information Center
1711 Illinois St. Golden CO 80401
Senior Software Engineer
Synergetics, Inc.
------------------------------------------------------