Ubuntu Python

Installing

First install python, setuptools, easy_install, and pip:

sudo apt-get install -y python python-setuptools python-pip

Now change permissions so we can run pip without sudo:

sudo usermod -g staff charles
sudo chmod g+w /usr
sudo chmod -R g+w /usr/local

Now install useful stuff:

pip install flask numpy scipy pandas h5py pytables xlrd xlwt pelican

Errors

O NOES

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('pip==1.5.4', 'console_scripts', 'pip')()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main
    return command.main(cmd_args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main
    text = '\n'.join(complete_log)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 72: ordinal not in range(128)

stack overflow to the rescue

I ran:

sudo apt-get install python-dev

and then

pip install numpy

ran without errors!