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I'm running a 64-bit flavor of Debian (LMDE) with GNOME, which includes a system python and various python-using applets and applications. I have a long-standing interest in scientific software, but only recently acquired some spare time and an Enthought Training license. So I'd like to get setup to work the Enthought Training exercises, which apparently means installing Canopy (formerly EPD), possibly et al.

I therefore want to install Canopy (and whatever else I need to do the Enthought Training that is not independently available via debian packages, as opposed to python packages) into a python virtual environment (as opposed to a VM like KVM, VirtualBox, or VMware) so as not to cause problems with dependencies of my system python. How to do this? conda? venv? virtualenv? Unfortunately I'm not seeing any howto's on Enthought's site, which is why I'm asking here (since they recommend asking on stackoverflow with tag=enthought).

Detailed howto is appreciated, as I am still pretty weak pythonically :-(

TomRoche
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Unnecessarily complicated. If you install Enthought Canopy and don't make it your default Python, it won't interfere with your system python at all, as by default it installs entirely into your home directory. Enthought Python will be the default inside the Canopy App and inside any Canopy Terminal that you open from the Canopy Tools menu, but not otherwise.

It may help you to know that when you install a python package, you install it into a particular python installation, not into your system at large. So any packages that you install into Canopy, using Canopy's package tools, will just be installed in Canopy not into your system python.

Jonathan March
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  • I shall attempt to verify this empirically. – TomRoche Aug 19 '14 at 17:00
  • To be clear -- if you use a Linux package manager to install a python package, it will install it into your system python. This is a specific example of the general point that I made above. – Jonathan March Aug 19 '14 at 22:51
  • I understand the difference between python and debian packages. The problem that motivated my question was, the last time I tried to install EPD Free (1-2 years ago), using *their* installer on a debian-based system, it whacked my system python and some dependent GNOME-based apps (e.g., hamster). – TomRoche Aug 19 '14 at 23:27
  • Speaking of debian packages, the one non-standard thing I needed to install was package=libpng16-16 from experimental. Other than that, so far, it just works! – TomRoche Aug 24 '14 at 01:22
  • libpng 16 was omitted in error from the Canopy 1.4 installer, but is available in the Canopy repo `enpkg libpng`. This is a more reliable way to install it into Canopy than from a Linux system package source. – Jonathan March Aug 24 '14 at 05:14