# Installation

ScientificPython uses the Python distutils package for compilation and installation. The distutils is part of the Python standard library as of Python 1.6. If you use Python 1.5, you must download and install distutils before installing ScientificPython.

On standard Unix systems, installation requires only two simple steps:

    python setup.py build
    python setup.py install

The second command installs ScientificPython in the Python library directory tree, which requires root priviledges with most installations. There are various options for installing ScientificPython in other places, see the distutils documentation for details or type

    python setup.py install --help

for a summary.

ScientificPython contains two optional interfaces to parallelization libraries, MPI and BSPlib. If you want to install any of them, the corresponding parallelization library must be installed first. Then change to directory Src/MPI (for the MPI library) or Src/BSPlib (for BSPlib) and type

    python compile.py

This produces an executable mpipython (for MPI) or bsppython (for BSPlib), which should be copied to any directory on your shell's search path. On most systems, /usr/local/bin is a suitable location. To run programs that use MPI, BSPlib, or a higher-level library building on them (such as the module Scientific.BSP), you must always use one of these executables instead of the standard Python interpreter. The MPI and BSPlib directories also include short shell scripts that run an interactive parallel interpreter. These scripts are called impipython and ibsppython, respectively, and should also be placed into a directory on the shell search path. The impipython script may need editing to adapt file paths to your MPI and Python installations.

For installation on non-Unix systems, see the distutils documentation.