Friday Session and solution to SciPy troubles! UPDATED How-To 27.10

Hello everyone,

First off, there will be a Friday Session again this week, where you can come for help with regards to the COBE lab. I strongly advise to get working on the coding and have your woes and worries laid out so that you can be helped with them - last minute coding troubles are never fun (and it's always questionable if I'll be able to help in time the closer to the deadline you ask).

Secondly - those of you who want to run the pre-supplied code in Python on the *astro* machines may already have run into trouble using the SciPy package that is installed together with the old Python version. After some fruitless efforts trying to rewrite some functions myself, it's clear the package/Python is simply too outdated. For those affected, we'll therefore simply be installing a newer Python version bundled with all packages we need in something called Anaconda. A guide on how to do this is given here. My own specific self-worded guide follows below, and should be all you need (UPDATED WITH EXTRA STEP):

1) ssh to an astro machine the normal way (remember not to enter the tcsh command etc, simply ssh to the terminal prompt)

2) Download the Python 2.7 version Anaconda install-files into your Download folder using these two commands:

cd Downloads/

wget https://repo.continuum.io/archive/Anaconda2-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh

3) Install Python 2.7 / Anaconda with the command:

bash Anaconda2-4.2.0-Linux-x86_64.sh

4) This will start up the installation. It will first ask you to review the license agreement (press enter until you're past it), and ask for some default options - simply answer yes to everything. This means Anaconda will be installed to the folder ~your_username/anaconda2, and a line will be added to your .bashrc that tells your terminal to start this Python installation when you type "python" into your terminal instead of the default already-installed one.

5) You will have to run your ".bashrc" file that (among other things) now configures which Python is referred to when typing "python" in the terminal, you do this by typing

source .bashrc

in the terminal while in your home-folder (type only "cd" to get to your homefolder).

6) Enjoy your now hopefully-updated-and-working-python!

7) Ask me for help when you get a not-working-after-all-python instead!

Cheers,

Ainar