Installing matplotlib - the hard way
I recently installed matplotlib from the source. It was quite an experience that I thought I would share my experience so that others don't have to waste time searching how to do that. So here it is! What is matplotlib? Matplotlib is a libarary to plot figures from your Python program. It has much more features than just plotting. You can read more about that from the library's home page . If you are planning to install matplotlib on Linux everything from the source by building everything yourself, this guide is for you. Please read on. You will have to install the dependencies first before you can install matplotlib. Matplotlib depends on numpy, zlib, libpng and FreeType libraries. You can get the full dependency list (including the optional dependent libraries) from here . Let us see how to install each one of these components. Phase 1: Installing numpy Numpy requires the same Fortran compiler that was used to build blas. There are two flavors of Fortran compilers possible: ...