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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-05T22:26:31+00:00

FEniCS that comes in the Ubuntu 12.04 repository does not work with Enthought EPD

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FEniCS that comes in the Ubuntu 12.04 repository does not work with Enthought EPD unless I do some crazy stuff with PYTHONPATH which can often result in EPD using Ubuntu repository python modules rather than EPD modules.

The alternative then is to compile and install all of the FEniCS modules manually. This is screwy because FEniCS needs sudo to install in the normal EPD directory, /usr/local/EPD. If you use sudo, this means that PATH environment variable is not being sourced from ~/.bashrc so it thinks it’s working with the native python, not EPD. I tried using the -i option on sudo, and that did some screwy things also.

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  1. Editorial Team

    I managed to solve my own problem. There were a bunch of issues with this technique that I am about to describe, and they are detailed here and here. For reasons that I don’t understand, reinstalling Ubuntu fixed the problems described in the links, but that’s beyond the scope of what I’m trying to cover here. Suffice it to say that it’s good to install Ubuntu with / and /home as separate partitions because it makes complete reinstall very easy.

    Procedure for Installing FEniCS for use with EPD

    1. Download all of the packages here. Create the directory ~/.local/src/fenics and save them there. Run tar -xvf on all the files in that directory. An easy easy to do this is with the command for i in *.tar.gz; do tar -xvf $i; done.
    2. First install the python modules FFC, FIAT, Instant, Viper and UFL by going into each of their directories and running python setup.py install --user. The user flag causes them to be installed in /.local/lib.. something. This will be added to your sys.path in python. You can read more about the –user flag here.
    3. Then navigate to the directories for dolfin and ufc, and in each of them run the following commands: cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=~/.local ., make, make install.
    4. Lastly, add source /home/chad/.local/share/dolfin/dolfin.conf to ~/.bashrc using gedit or emacs if you want to use a powerful text editor.

    EDIT
    You must also install ScientificPython using python setup.py install --user, and this is relatively painless.
    EDIT

    This should get you up and running for the demos in ~/.local/share/dolfin/demo/pde/poisson/python. I hope this helps someone.

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