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EPDFree Installation (MacOS)

To download EPD go to the EPDFree download page. Open the EPD disk image then double-click on EPD.mpkg and follow the prompts to install. Choose all the defaults for installing (in particular use the default installation location).

Finally run the shell startup file, which the EPD installer has edited:

source ~/.profile

To check EPD has installed correctly, open a new terminal window and type:

which ipython

You should see something like:

/Library/Frameworks/EPD32.framework/Versions/Current/bin/ipython

Install additional packages

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

First ensure that XCode version 3 or 4 is installed. To check if XCode is installed type gcc on the command-line. If you get gcc: command not found then XCode is not installed. To install it, use the install DVDs for your Mac, or if you are using MacOS 10.6 or 10.7, you can also get XCode 4 from the App Store.

Once XCode is installed copy and paste the lines below one at a time, checking that each one works. The program outputs may contain various “warnings” that can be ignored, 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

After running these two commands close and re-open the terminal so that pip will be recognised. Then run:

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 test whether you 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]])

The commands above should succeed with no 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 run without errors, you’ve installed everything successfully!