- The purpose of this page is to describe
the software requirements for the
SciVis class (besides svn), and to collect updated information about getting the software
working on different computers.
- A Unix-like operating system is assumed. On Macs you'll be using a Terminal
window. Linux distributions have different ways of providing a command-line prompt.
We will not be able to help diagnose problems on Windows, but installing
Cygwin would be the first step towards
making a unix-like environment there.
- The current plan is to use the Python
language and some of its libraries,
as well as some bindings to C libraries, as the basis of the programming assignments.
- We will likely not be using much of SciPy,
Matplotlib,
or Mayavi.
These are nice packages, but encapsulate too much, too little,
or the wrong functionality for learning the
conceptual fundamentals of scientific visualization.
- For the first project (yet to be assigned), the software will
simply be Python, Numpy for array
processing,
and PIL for
reading in PNG images. Let us know (via email to the
scivis-2013-teach mailing list) if you have trouble getting PIL to
work; the
newer Pillow fork may
be more appropriate.
- Here is info from the TA about getting the example code for Project 1 working in Python3:
- If you haven't already, install Python 3.X. Also install the devel package and Python2to3 conversion tool.
- Make sure that you have prerequisites mentioned in the build
instructions from here
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Pillow. If you do not have prerequisites, install the missing libraries.
- Get a fork of PIL from here: http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/. Install it using python3.
- Get a version of numpy from here http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/. Install it using python3
- In the sample file read.py provided on the website, make sure to convert print statements into function calls. In other words, replace "print bla, bla, bla" with "print(bla,bla,bla)".
- Enjoy the unleashed power of Python 3!