This post shows you how to setup the required environment for the pandas tutorial, given at the PyCon 2012 Information for the talk/tutorial: https://us.pycon.org/2012/schedule/presentation/427/ The talk is also available at YouTube.

This is written against a 64bit linux/ubuntu

1. You need a bunch of packages installed via apt(itude|-get)

   sudo aptitude install build-essential libzmq-dev python2.7-dev libblas-dev liblapack-dev libsuitesparse-dev swig gfortran libfreetype6-dev libpng12-dev
   

2. If you don’t mind having all development headers installed, you can also use

   sudo aptitude build-dep python-matplotlib python-scipy python-numpy
   

3. Create a new virtualenv (I’ll use virtualenvwrapper)

   mkvirtualenv pandastutorial --no-site-packages
   workon pandastutorial
   

4. install the required python packages (will take a while)

   pip install ipython numpy pyzmq tornado
   pip install scipy matplotlib pandas
   

5. Grab the tutorial package and run the server

   mkdir -p ~/tmp/pandastutorial
   cd ~/tmp/pandastutorial
   wget http://dl.dropbox.com/u/11102422/PandasTutorialFiles.zip
   unzip PandasTutorialFiles.zip
   

6. Verify you setup

   ipython --pylab -c 'import pandas; print pandas.__version__'
   

   This must not show any errors and the pandas version has to be >= 0.7

7. Start the notebook app

   ipython notebook --pylab=inline
   

   This should open you browser an 127.0.0.1:8888 (or on the first free port after 8888)

If you’re not using a virtual environment, you can substitute the steps 1.-3. with the following commands:

sudo aptitude install ipython python-numpy python-zmq python-tornado python-scipy python-matplotlib python-pip
sudo pip install pandas