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Older mac OS install instructions

Old mac installations:

You want to be running at least Mac OS X 10.7.5. Please upgrade before you start trying to install the software for this class. This is based on my own experience. Students were also able to get the following to work with OS X 10.8. However, an extra set must be taken in 10.9 (Maverick) due to a bug in the default implementation of tkinter. So if you find that animations hang, try installing the latest mac disk image from http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/downloads Links to an external site. .

I have found that it's useful to download Xcode Links to an external site.. Another nice free tool you should get is homebrew Links to an external site.. This makes is much easier to download free software that is useful for coding and scientific research.

Vpython developers instructions

There are two methods that I've got to work. The first comes from the inventors of visual python, Bruce Sherwood and Steve Spicklemire. Steve Spicklemire wrote:

"I've built a "python.org" python installer for scipy that works along with the "python.org" installer for visual python.

If you 1) Install http://python.org Links to an external site. python 2.7.6 Links to an external site.

then: 2) http://vpython.org Links to an external site. VPython 6.05 Links to an external site.

then: 3) Scipy using my installer from above.

This includes a working version of 'pip' that can be used to install additional packages."

Using Old Enthought and Vpython packages

Downloading the latest SciPy release from enthought Links to an external site. does not seem to work with Vpython. So instead I've found that using an older release from https://enthought.com/repo/free Links to an external site. namely https://s3.amazonaws.com/storage.enthought.com/installers/epd_free-7.3-2-macosx-i386.dmg Links to an external site. works.

I've found that the visual python recommended from http://vpython.org/contents/download_mac.html Links to an external site. does not work either. Fortunately there is an earlier release that does at http://vpython.org/contents/download Links to an external site. namely http://vpython.org/contents/download/VPython-Mac-Py2.7-5.74.zip Links to an external site. . However this still does not entirely work with SciPy. In order to remedy the situation, you have to follow these instructions Links to an external site. From Chris Myers. I reproduce these below with some comments of my experience:

 Check to see if you have a Fortran compiler -- if not download and install one -- this will be needed to fix a problem with numpy that the VPython installer causes

 

With SciPy and Xcode, you should have this.

 

 If you are using "Lion" or "Mountain Lion" you can get one from Apple as part of the  "command line tools" for "Xcode".

 

You should have already done this.

 

 Another place to get a fortran compiler is http://r.research.att.com/tools
    

Links to an external site..

 

You shouldn't need to worry about this either

 Type the following

 

cd /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions

You may have found, as I did, that with the system you have, and all the tinkering that you have done, that you already have a a 2.7 directory there! In this case DO NOT PROCEED TO THE NEXT STEP UNTIL YOU'VE MOVED THIS DIRECTORY SOMEWHERE ELSE! Don't delete it in case something else goes wrong. Instead type: sudo mv 2.7 ~/ as this will move it out of the way. Now you can go to the next step:

 sudo ln -s 7.3 2.7

 

You will need to type in your root password.

Download and install VPython

The VPython installer overwrites numpy with an earlier version. To fix it type

easy_install -U numpy

You will get a bunch of error messages. Just ignore them. It should now work.

Note those are his words, not mine!

 

There appear to be other successful methods for installing vpython with scipy. See: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/vpython-users/_BkzxuorIas Links to an external site. but they didn't work for me recently. So for the moment the method is broken. (There are problems with compatibility of "freetype" that are not easily fixed).