[IPython-user] Trouble with Win2K install

[Fernando Perez]

Dave Merrill wrote:
> I'm new to python, and ipython, but not to programming, having trouble
> getting ipython installed on windows 2000, python 233. Any help would be
> much appreciated; I'm sure I'm being some basic flavor of dense...
> 
> First downloaded and installed PythonWin, readline and ctypes. They're all
> pretty clearly here and working, because I can run PythonWin, and from
> there, importing readline and ctypes works.
> 
> Then downloaded ipython-0.6.6.zip and unzipped it. When I double-click
> setup.py, I get only a brief wait cursor; nothing else happens, and
> importing ipython as a test fails.
> 
> I tried moving the whole unzipped dir to site-packages, no difference.
> 
> Both files in the scripts dir, ipython and pycolor, have no filename
> extension, which seems odd to my newbie eye. I tried renaming them to .py,
> still no difference.
> 
> My apologies for this basic question, and my no-doubt-ignorant flailing
> about. Very much looking forward to getting this working.

I'm not a windows user, so this may be off base.  But recently I tried to 
install the windows ipython on an XP machine, and I noticed a problem: if you 
use the default .zip support in Windows and double-click the setup.py file, 
nothing happens because windows does not do a full uncompress in a temp 
directory (like winzip does).  So you need to really extract the full zip 
directory to a standalone folder.  But from your email, I seem to understand 
that you've already done this, so let's look for other things.

One thing you can try is to execute the setup.py by hand: open up a terminal, 
and go into the folder where you unzipped it.  Then, try:

/path/to/your/python.exe setup.py install

If you get an error message there, please copy and paste it exactly to the 
list. With an actual traceback, we should be able to help.

Cheers,

f

ps.  This section of the manual:

http://ipython.scipy.org/doc/manual/node2.html#SECTION00023000000000000000

gives you a bit more detail about the windows installation, which may help 
track down your problem.