Installing Pylab/Matplotlib

Question

I'm trying to write a program that plots a graph, which made me look into Matplotlib.

I found a tutorial that started out with this little program, that worked fine:

from pylab import *

def main():
    X = np.linspace(-np.pi, np.pi, 256, endpoint=True)
    C,S = np.cos(X), np.sin(X)
    plot(X,C)
    plot(X,S)
    show()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

Then I tried to run it on another computer, where it did not work at all. I tried to download Pylab and Matplotlib. When I had installed Matplotlib it demanded something called dateutil, when I got dateutil it demanded something called six. I downloaded six, but it didn't work properly.

It doesn't feel like I'm on the right track. What should I do to get a proper installation?

EDIT:

I'm using Python 2.7 on Windows 7.

The error I get is

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Python\mscript\listdb2.py", line 19, in <module>
    from pylab import *
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pylab.py", line 1, in <module>
    from matplotlib.pylab import *
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\pylab.py", line 226, in <module>
    import matplotlib.finance
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\finance.py", line 21, in <module>
    from matplotlib.dates import date2num
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\matplotlib\dates.py", line 119, in <module>
    from dateutil.rrule import (rrule, MO, TU, WE, TH, FR, SA, SU, YEARLY,
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\dateutil\rrule.py", line 18, in <module>
    from six import advance_iterator, integer_types
ImportError: No module named six

The file six.py is located in C:\python27\Lib\site-packages\six\six.py

The six directory also contains a file called test_six.py. If I try to run this program I also get an error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "test_six.py", line 5, in <module>
    import.py
ImportError: No module named py

Answer 1

If Anaconda installed and it is already in your environment path, you can get it simply using

conda install matplotlib

in command line and then call in Python with

from pylab import *

This work for me fine as "pip install" and "easy_install" both on Win and Linux caused a lot of issues

Answer 2

Installing packages on *nix is easy using pip. Pip allows you to easily install packages from the Python Package Index (PyPI) with a simple pip install matplotlib. This should install all dependencies, but if it does not then you can install them manually (for instance pip install python-dateutil).

Using pip with Windows is possible though slightly more difficult for packages that require compilers and such. However, installing Python programs on Windows is simple if you use these Windows binaries provided by Christoph Gohlke.

The particular ones for matplotlib can be found here. Note that you can also find similar binaries for python-dateutil, six, etc if necessary.

*As an aside: I would strongly suggest you look into using the full matplotlib.pyplot API rather than pylab. It's much more powerful and useful, but this is just some aside advice :) *