Installation notes on ipython-notebook

ipython-notebook is a nice piece of kit, a sort of user-friendly pocket web interface slash gui for mucking around with Python. According to the official site, it’s “a web-based interactive computational environment where you can combine code execution, text, mathematics, plots and rich media into a single document”. More introductory information is available here (along with some very pretty screenshots).

I like the idea of it, not so much for development work but for data analysis and worked demonstration. For something to share it certainly beats a command-line session.

It looks rather like this:

I encountered it during an e-Humanities workshop yesterday and I’m already itching to play with it again.

Getting it to install on Slackware involved a few steps. There are probably better ways, but here’s how I did it, based more or less on http://raj.blog.archive.org/2012/02/02/installing-ipython-notebook-to-replace-matlab/:

Step 0: optional. Open sbopkg as root. Search for and install python3. Version 2.6 works with the ipython-notebook but 3 likes sets and UTF8 better.
Step 1: curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
Step 2: sudo python distribute_setup.py
Step 3: easy_install pip
Step 4: Now that you have pip, you can follow the latter part of the blog post above:

Open sbopkg as root. Search for and install zeromq.

For the moment, install libpgm-5.1.116~dfsg from source (tar xvfz libpgm-5.1.116~dfsg.tar.gz; ./configure; make; make install).

pip install ipython

pip install pyzmq
pip install tornado
pip install --upgrade ipython
pip install numpy
pip install matplotlib
Follow the configuration instructions described in the blog post.