EPD Free (Linux)

To download EPD go to the EPDFree download page. You need to establish whether your computer has a 32-bit or 64-bit processor and download the relevant package. To do this type uname -mpi at the command line. If you see x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 you have a 64-bit machine and operating system (OS). If you see one or more i686 or i386 you are running a 32-bit OS.

Once you have downloaded the appropriate EPD package for your system, run the installation script. For example:

bash epd_free-7-1-2-rh5-x86.sh

Next you need to edit the appropriate shell startup file (e.g. ~/.cshrc, ~/.bash_profile) and update your path to include the EPD path. For instance if you specified to install EPD in /home/me/epd7.1 then the following will work:

export PATH=/home/me/epd7.1/bin:$PATH  # bash
set path=(/home/me/epd7.1/bin $path)   # csh or tcsh

Finally run the shell startup file with:

source ~/.bash_profile    # bash
source ~/.cshrc           # csh or tcsh

To check the installation has completed successfully, open a new terminal window and type:

which ipython

You should see:

/home/me/epd7.1/bin/ipython

where /home/me/epd7.1 is replaced by your installation root path.

Install additional packages

Once you’ve installed EPDFree you can install the additional packages listed in Python requirements. 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:

sudo easy_install --upgrade pip
sudo pip install --upgrade distribute
pip install --user asciitable
pip install --user pyfits
pip install --user pywcs
pip install --user atpy
pip install --user aplpy
pip install --user pyregion
pip install --user pyparsing
pip install --user http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/vo-0.6.tar.gz
pip install --user http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/coords-0.37.tar.gz

Test your installation

To do a 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 pyfits
import pywcs
import atpy
import aplpy

If all the above commands ran without errors, you’ve installed everything successfully!