Installing scipy 0.7.0 on openSUSE

I had to rebuild parts of my toolchain because I messed up my OS and needed to reinstall. In the process of searching for nice numpy and scipy packages for openSuSE (which failed), I discovered that now its actually possible to do

easy_install numpy
easy_install scipy

(provided that you have the python-distutils package installed). That's great. But... it doesn't work! At least not on openSUSE. I could convince numpy to install somehow. I don't remember exactly, I think I at least needed to install gfortran, maybe also blas and lapack from the scientificlinux-repository in the build service.

For scipy then it was a little bit more work. It kept complaining that it did not find BLAS and LAPACK, even though I edited numpy's site.cfg file so that it should be aware of the location of the shared libs.

It turned out that to install scipy I had to:

1. Download BLAS sources and unpack them, e.g. to $HOME/Apps/BLAS
   
2. edit make.inc in that directory, changing the FORTRAN line to

   FORTRAN  = gfortran

   
   
3. build BLAS by calling make in the BLAS dir
   
4. DL and unpack LAPACK to $HOME/Apps/lapack-3.2
   
5. edit make.inc.example in that dir, changing the BLASLIB line to

   BLASLIB = $(HOME)/Apps/BLAS/blas$(PLAT).a

   and saving that file as make.inc
   
6. build LAPACK by typing make in the lapack dir.
   
7. Download scipy, unpack it and start the build process:

   python setup.py install

   
   

That takes quite a while. It seems it builds LAPACK and BLAS again, so maybe you don't have to build it first, but I guess you need at least to make the appropriate modifications to the respective make.inc files. Comments on that are welcome.

But most important: it finally worked :)

Update: At least I thought it worked. It didn't :D Problem was that import scipy produced a symbol not found error. Maybe adjusting ldconfig's path could fix this, but I don't have time to look into this. Installed numpy & scipy from the scientificLinux repo (link see above).