Assorted Experience

easy_install -m xxx also, remove the .egg directory under site-packages

HDF5 is a data file format specification with some opensource libraries. Matlab version 7.3 and above are supposed to store data in this format . You can load these files into Python using the h5py library. IMPORTANT: Due to an incompatibility with HDF5 1.8.5 h5py tests (and operation) will fail. Using 1.8.4 or earlier should resolve the issue. ( issue 124 ) When installing h5py  change to super user account (su) rather than sudo because you need some environment variables to be set during the installation Install HDF5 on your machine Following instructions from http://www.hdfgroup.org/ftp/HDF5/current/src/unpacked/release_docs/INSTALL grab the bz2 file ftp://ftp.hdfgroup.org/HDF5/prev-releases/hdf5-1.8.4-patch1/src/hdf5-1.8.4-patch1.tar.bz2 bunzip2 hdf5-1.8.4-patch1.tar.bz2 tar -xvf hdf5-1.8.4-patch1 cd hdf5-1.8.4-patch1 ./configure --prefix=/usr/local/hdf5 make make check sudo make install make check-install Install h5py su export HDF5_DIR=/usr/local/...

Problem: The "save as" dialog box is too big for your screen and some of the options (such as new folder) and the resize corner are off screen, making things very, very, annoying. Solution: Hit the 'shrink' button (up arrow) to see the abbreviated version of the "save as" menu. Then press that button again (now the 'expand' button). The dialog box now will fit the screen and you drag the corner to resize the dialog to a sensible size, which it will store. From here .

Problem: Need to make a running *nix process nohup Solution: CTRL+Z to suspend bg to background disown to make it effectively nohup From here and here and here