Tired of waiting for a SciPy package to come out for SL6, I tried to compile a version and was surprised to find success.
I have all standard SL6 packages for the dependencies, only the SciPy source itself has to be downloaded. This means that to follow my steps you'll need to install python, numpy, gcc, gfortran, whatever BLAS/ATLAS you want. I basically went through the Add/Remove packages GUI and clicked anything that looked like it might be a SciPy dependency. I highly recommend the IPython shell too, but I guess it's not necessary. Since TUV shipped an older version of NumPy, you can't use the latest SciPy. The latest one that I found to work was http://sourceforge.net/projects/scipy/files/scipy/0.7.1/ , though I had to dig a bit to find version depency information, so I might have missed a slightly higher version that also would work. My instructions will assume not much familiarity with compiling code. Download the tar archive to a suitable location, like ~/Software. This location should be where scipy will "live" in the future, so don't put it on your desktop. Issue the command "tar -xzvf scipy-0.7.1.tar.gz" which will extract everything to ~/Software/scipy-0.7.1. I like to move the original .tar.gz file into this directory as well. >From your scipy-0.7.1 directory, issue "python setup.py build". This will perform the actual compilation. It took several minutes on my modern quad-core machine. >From the same directory, but now as root, issue "python setup.py install". If you don't have root access on your system, you will need to use an option like --prefix=/home/user/wherescipywillive, but then you'll also need to tell your python interpreter to look there for scipy. Now in your python shell, you can "import scipy" and try to run "scipy.test()". Mine returned a small number of errors, but the error reports are not formatted for humans, so I'm willing to call it a success. When a packaged SciPy eventually comes out for SL6, I do not know how to properly undo the steps outlined above. The setup.py script doesn't come with an "uninstall" function, so some manual cleaning up will probably be required. Jean-François
