Installing matplotlib on Mac OS X 10.6 without terminal

Question

For different reasons I cannot use admin in terminal. It is a way to install matplotlib on Mac OS X 10.6 without using terminal?

Answer 1

Installing anaconda or canopy python distributions is basically straight forward and don't require a lot of terminal action.

I don't have a mac so I'm not quite sure how it's done there but on win it's basically an .exe you run. For a taste of what you can expect:

I use anaconda on win, default installation is python2.7 with about a ~100 more packages (including matplotlib). In conda you can configure additional environments (py2.6, py3.3, py3.4) and have them in parallel with the default 2.7 without a terminal as well. However depending on your IDE you might or might not be able to use them.

Ie to use python2.7 and 3.4 interpreters, using microsoft visual studio as IDE, you need to set 2 different environmental variables (possible in win without terminal, don't know iOS). There's some minor set-up steps you need to do in IDE too, but non require terminal.

Conda comes with spyder IDE so it's possible, probably , to set up the same thing in there without terminal/console/prompt.

It is also possible to start anaconda graphical launcher and start IPython cosole and IPython notebook from there. You can pick your environment there too, so you can start IPy with py3k or py2k. It's possible to configure additional environments from the graphical launcher too. Unfortunately the envs. you configure there will not have all the packages that the default distribution has installed. In fact they'll just have the bare python interpreter.

If you don't mind using python2.7 you can get what you want. Second biggest issue I see with this is that you can't install additional packages, because they require you to use the terminal, activate the env. you want to use ( source activate [env.name]) and then running conda install [package.name]`.

I think similar might be true for canopy (worth checking out though, personally I don't use it).

But in general the idea is that you'll create virtual envs, run source activate {env.name} and continue from there. Limiting yourself to actions without terminal spells out a lot of work to achieve even a limited number of options these distributions offer to you.

Answer 2

Do you mean by "cannot use admin in terminal", that you don't have root access, but can use terminal for ordinary user? If so and assuming you have Python already installed, you can install modules not systewide, but only for single user (without root privileges) as described here .