Installation

oxitopped is distributed in several formats. The following sections detail installation on a variety of platforms.

Pre-requisites

Where possible, I endeavour to provide installation methods that provide all pre-requisites automatically - see the following sections for platform specific instructions.

If your platform is not listed (or you’re simply interested in what oxitopped depends on): oxitopped depends primarily on pyserial. If you wish to use the GUI you will also need PyQt4 installed.

Additional optional dependencies are:

• xlwt - required for Excel writing support
• matplotlib - required for graphing support

Ubuntu Linux

For Ubuntu Linux, it is simplest to install from the Waveform PPA as follows (this also ensures you are kept up to date as new releases are made):

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa://waveform/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install oxitopped

Microsoft Windows

On Windows it is simplest to install from the standalone MSI installation package available from the oxitopped homepage. Be aware that the installation package requires administrator privileges.

Apple Mac OS X

XXX To be written

Other Platforms

If your platform is not covered by one of the sections above, oxitopped is available from PyPI and can therefore be installed with the Python distribute pip tool:

$ pip install oxitopped

Theoretically this should install the mandatory pre-requisites, but optional pre-requisites require suffixes like the following:

$ pip install "oxitopped[GUI,XLS]"

Please be aware that at this time, the PyQt package does not build “nicely” under pip. If it is available from your distro’s package manager I strongly recommend using that as your source of this pre-requisite.

If PyQt is not provided by your distro (or you’re on some esoteric platform without a package manager), you can try following the instructions on the Veusz wiki for building PyQt (and SIP) under a virtualenv sandbox.

Development

If you wish to develop oxitopped, you can install the pre-requisites, construct a virtualenv sandbox, and check out the source code from GitHub with the following command lines:

# Install the pre-requisites
$ sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib python-xlwt python-qt4 python-virtualenv python-sphinx make git

# Construct and activate a sandbox with access to the packages we just
# installed
$ virtualenv --system-site-packages sandbox
$ source sandbox/bin/activate

# Check out the source code and install it in the sandbox for development and testing
$ git clone https://github.com/waveform-computing/oxitopped.git
$ cd oxitopped
$ make develop

The above instructions assume you are on Ubuntu Linux. Please feel free to extend this section with instructions for alternate platforms.