[IPython-User] making notebook aware of environmental variables

[Zoltán Vörös]

On 01/27/2012 01:59 AM, Fernando Perez wrote:
> 2012/1/26 Zoltán Vörös<zvoros@gmail.com>:
>> Even if I explicitly issue
>>
>> os.system('export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH')
>> or
>> os.putenv('LD_LIBRARY_PATH','/usr/local/cuda/lib64')
>>
>> in the notebook, that doesn't change the situation.
>>
>> Given this, should I just open an issue?
> Hold on, let's try to figure out what's going on in your system,
> because it's kind of odd.  In the notebook, I see my env. variables
> perfectly fine.
>
> In what exact file are you setting your environment variables?  And
> what OS are you using?
Right, I was going a bit too fast. So, the system is ubuntu 11.10, 
64-bit. First, I put the export commands into my .bashrc, and when that 
did not work, I tried to do the same from the command line like this

In [1]: os.putenv('LD_LIBRARY_PATH','/usr/local/cuda/lib64')

I thought that that would take care of that, although, the docstring of 
putenv says that this would effect processes that are started later by 
popen or something similar.

When I do this in the notebook

In [5]: print os.getenv('LD_LIBRARY_PATH')

  the output is None, even if there was a specific

In [4]: os.putenv('LD_LIBRARY_PATH','/usr/local/cuda/lib64')

before. As I said, exporting does not help either. On the other hand, the output of the same command in the ipython console is

In [13]: print os.getenv('LD_LIBRARY_PATH')
/usr/local/cuda/lib64:

and that is what I expect. I also tried to start ipython notebook from the bash shell, and I exported the variables in the shell itself. But that does not solve the problem. That works only, if I run ipython console. Somehow, the notebook is detached from what initialised it in the first place.
Any comments on how to shoot the trouble?
Cheers,
Zoltán