Python

I am trying to run matplotlib but seems it is not installed on my windows (ActivePython 2.6) package. Therefore I was looking for a good way to install it. Now, it is a part of several scientific libraries and these libraries have different installers.

One good way to install is using easy_install, but it looks not possible for python 2.6. Finally I gave up on easy_install. I downloaded the matplotlib library (for python 2.5 as there is none corresponding to 2.6).

Finally I concluded that there is little support for python 2.6 and I uninstalled the 2.6 version and installed the 2.5 version.

Installing Mingw

I tried installing Mingw for ease of writing scripts (an alternative is Powershell, but I am not quite familiar with it). Mingw installer is quite fragile.

First, you have to make sure the directory where you are installing has no space character in its name. Next, they "recommend" installing in C:\Mingw.

Third, when I tried a custom install with g++ and mingw-make included, there was a problem: the link connection to mingw-make download site never worked. This lead to problems during installation. I retried the installation (giving the same installation path), but the same problem occurred again and again. Finally I did a standard installation, which worked just fine.

I will retry installing the mingw-make by updating mingw later on (right now the connection breaks).