Trouble installing scipy in virtualenv on a amazon ec2 linux micro instance

Question

I have successfully installed scipy in the default python compiler on an amazon ec2 micro instance (Ubuntu 13.04). However, I am not able to install scipy in a virtualenv.

pip install scipy ends with this error

scipy/sparse/sparsetools/csr_wrap.cxx: In function ‘void init_csr()’:

scipy/sparse/sparsetools/csr_wrap.cxx:73303:21: warning: variable ‘md’ set but not used [-Wunused-but-set-variable]

c++: internal compiler error: Killed (program cc1plus)

Please submit a full bug report,

with preprocessed source if appropriate.

See <file:///usr/share/doc/gcc-4.7/README.Bugs> for instructions.

----------------------------------------

Cleaning up...

Command /home/ubuntu/pnr/bin/python -c "import setuptools;__file__='/home/ubuntu/pnr/build/scipy/setup.py';exec(compile(open(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-t8Drvd-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --install-headers /home/ubuntu/pnr/include/site/python2.7 failed with error code -9 in /home/ubuntu/pnr/build/scipy

and

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/home/ubuntu/pnr/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>

    load_entry_point('pip==1.4.1', 'console_scripts', 'pip')()

  File "/home/ubuntu/pnr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 148, in main

    return command.main(args[1:], options)

  File "/home/ubuntu/pnr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pip/basecommand.py", line 169, in main

    text = '\n'.join(complete_log)

UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 53: ordinal not in range(128)

Before anyone asks. pip freeze for default compiler returns

Cheetah==2.4.4

Landscape-Client==12.12

M2Crypto==0.21.1

PAM==0.4.2

Pillow==2.0.0

PyYAML==3.10

Twisted-Core==12.3.0

Twisted-Names==12.3.0

Twisted-Web==12.3.0

apt-xapian-index==0.45

argparse==1.2.1

boto==2.3.0

chardet==2.0.1

cloud-init==0.7.2

configobj==4.7.2

distribute==0.6.34

distro-info==0.10

euca2ools==2.1.1

numpy==1.7.1

oauth==1.0.1

paramiko==1.7.7.1

prettytable==0.6.1

pyOpenSSL==0.13

pycrypto==2.6

pycurl==7.19.0

pygobject==3.8.0

pyserial==2.6

python-apt==0.8.8ubuntu6

python-debian==0.1.21-nmu2ubuntu1

requests==1.1.0

scipy==0.11.0

six==1.2.0

ssh-import-id==3.14

urllib3==1.5

virtualenv==1.10.1

wsgiref==0.1.2

zope.interface==4.0.5

pip freeze command for virtualenv returns

Cython==0.19.2

Flask==0.10.1

Flask-Bootstrap==3.0.0.1

Flask-WTF==0.9.3

Jinja2==2.7.1

MarkupSafe==0.18

WTForms==1.0.5

Werkzeug==0.9.4

argparse==1.2.1

beautifulsoup4==4.3.2

itsdangerous==0.23

numpy==1.7.1

pymongo==2.6.2

requests==2.0.0

wsgiref==0.1.2

Answer 1

The first solution is to temporarily enable swap on your micro instance. Follow the below steps:

sudo /bin/dd if=/dev/zero of=/var/swap.1 bs=1M count=1024

sudo /sbin/mkswap /var/swap.1

sudo /sbin/swapon /var/swap.1

When the swap is on, you can install scipy via pip:

sudo apt-get install -y libatlas-base-dev gfortran

python-dev build-essential g++

sudo pip install numpy

sudo pip install scipy

After installation of scipy, you can disable it with these commands:

sudo swapoff /var/swap.1

sudo rm /var/swap.1

An alternate way for instaling scipy, try this:

pip --no-cache-dir install scipy