[vtkusers] Building/installing VTK 5.4.2 on Ubuntu 9.10 (was: Python compass widget example)

[David Gobbi]

I found the "official" document on using Python/VTK, and I feel kind
of silly for not remembering where it was.  It's in with the VTK
source code.

VTK/Wrapping/Python/README.txt


On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 11:27 AM, David Gobbi <david.gobbi at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Anders,
>
> I'm sure there used to be something about this one the website, but it
> seems to be gone.  So here is a brief run-through.
>
> The easiest way to get things working is to set environment variables.
>  If your VTK was built in /home/user/VTKbin you would do the
> following:
>
> In a bash shell (the default for most linux systems):
>
> export VTK_DIR=/home/user/VTKbin
> export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${VTK_DIR}/bin
> export PYTHONPATH=${VTK_DIR}/bin;${VTK_DIR}/Wrapping/Python
>
> You can put these in your ~/.bashrc in order to set these variable
> automatically whenever you start a terminal.  On the Mac, you would
> use DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH instead of LD_LIBRARY_PATH but everything else
> is the same.
>
> The other approach is to do a "make install", since /usr/local/lib
> should already be part of the runtime library path, and all the python
> modules should automatically go somewhere in Python's load path. But
> generally, setting environment variables is the easiest way to set
> things up for a single person.
>
>   David
>
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jan 30, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Anders Wallin
> <anders.e.e.wallin at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Thanks! This now allows me to run both ccmake and make without errors.
>>
>> Then we come to the install part...
>> I navigate to my build dir and there: VTK/VTK-linux/Wrapping/Python
>> and run:
>> sudo python setup.py install
>>
>> well now what?, I start a python shell and type
>> import vtk
>> which results in:
>>>>> import vtk
>> Traceback (most recent call last):
>>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>>  File "vtk/__init__.py", line 41, in <module>
>>    from common import *
>>  File "vtk/common.py", line 7, in <module>
>>    from libvtkCommonPython import *
>> ImportError: No module named libvtkCommonPython
>>
>>
>>
>> Anders
>> (wishing someone had "step-by-step, For Dummies" build/installation
>> instructions)
>>
>>
>>
>>> You really should not confgure (run cmake or ccmake) in the source
>>> tree. This will cause you many headaches down the road.
>>>
>>> To recover from this, you should delete the entire vtk source tree.
>>> Checkout vtk again
>>>
>>> Make a binary (build) directory. I always make by build directory at
>>> the same level as my source tree e.g.
>>>
>>> mkdir VTK-linux
>>> cd VTK-linux
>>> ccmake ../VTK
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