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Installing python and friends on Windows (vista)

One way to go is to get the installer from Enthought [here]. This is the academic version, but their license agreement is not clear to me: it is not clear that even as a researcher working on public money in a university doing research I publish in publicly accessible journals and make available on my website, I can use this distribution. What you pay for is the convenience of having a lot of open source python related software bundled together. You also get a lot of packages you may not be using.

For me, the old fashioned hunter gatherer lifestyle leads me to the following course of action:
  1. Download and install python using the installer [python.org]
  2. Download and install setup tools [python.org, scroll to the bottom]
  3. Run command prompt as admin to use easy_install [guide here]
  4. Install ipython
    easy_install http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/ipython-0.8.2-py2.5.egg
    easy_install http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/pyreadline-1.5.dev_r2876-py2.5.egg
    [or whatever versions you want from that page]
  5. Install numpy
    The egg is through sourceforge, which doesn't have direct access, so download it to a directory and then use the egg from there
    easy_install "D:\Documents\My Downloads\numpy-1.0.4-py2.5-win32.egg"
  6. Install scipy
    Download the egg from sourceforge, and then easy_install:
    easy_install "D:\Documents\My Downloads\scipy-0.6.0-py2.5-win32.egg"
  7. Install matplotlib
    The egg is through sourceforge, which doesn't have direct access, so download it to a directory and then use the egg from there
    easy_install "D:\Documents\My Downloads\matplotlib-0.91.2.win32-py2.5.egg"
These steps take care of everything including 2D plots that are exportable to svg, but what about 3D plots? This gets more tricky.
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