Installing Python on Windows

Install the Enthought Python Distribution for Windows

Download the academic version of the Enthought Python Distribution (EPD). (or get it from our local mirror here.) Enthought develops software for scientific computing (substantially with python) and is a major sponsor of numpy and scipy development. EPD packages the python interpreter with a bunch of software popular in the scientific computing world.

Install EPD. Be sure to use the academic license and install to the directory C:\Python26 (the default).

Install R

R is the quickly becoming the standard tool for doing scientific statistics. It is free (libre/freedom and gratis/beer) and has a large community. While R is a competitor to python in the sense that it is a programming language that is not python, we take the pragmatic approach. If you're doing any sort of large scale stats, you're probably using R. Thankfully, the python community as written R bindings. That is, people have written tools to make R accessible from python. For that we use the rpy2 library.

Download R from one of the mirrors (ex Iowa State, Michigan Tech, or University of North Carolina). The default options are fine.

Install rpy2

Download and install rpy2. Be sure to install it in the same location as EPD.

]

Testing Install

Using the run dialog, run ipython.

It should look like this:

Now continue on to Testing your installation.

Cleaning out an old python install

If you had an older, possibly broken install, here are some directions on uninstalling as much as possible. Only do this if you have everything saved someplace safe.

Uninstall the old python versions. Control Panels/Add Remove Programs - Uninstall the old python. You may want to remove the appropriate directory in Program Files, too.

Possible distributions:

• python
• python(x,y)
• Enthought Python Distribution
• Active Python Distribution

In C:, delete the directories Python25 and Python26. This will also get rid of any third part libraries that may have been installed.

Yay! You should be all clean.