*  Informatique / Python / Building Python 2.7.x/3.6.x with Mayavi 4.5.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

pict pict

In this section I explain how to install Mayavi 4.5.1 (development version) for Python 3 on Ubuntu 17.10 by using PyQt 5.

To use Mayavi 4.5.0 python package, the version 4 of PyQt is needed: version 5 is not supported in this version of Mayavi. To use PyQt version 5 one has to install Mayavi 4.5.1 (development version on march 2018), pyface (>= 5.2.0) and traitsui (>=5.2.0)

Firstly we install (as root) python3, python3-pip and python3-env Ubuntu packages. The last one will be used to create Python virtual environments. 

sudo apt-get install python3 python3-pip python3-venv

As first step, we create a virtual environment in  /python-env/python3 directory 

python3 -m venv ~/python-env/python3/Mayavi

We can now load this virtual environment: 
source  ~/python-env/python3/Mayavi/bin/activate

All the following commands will be execute in this environment. I have somme trouble when using pip3 for installing some packages:
error: invalid command ’bdist_wheel’ ... To avoid this trouble, I use the –no-cache-dir option. There are the command to install some usefull packages (for me) 
pip3 install numpy scipy matplotlib ipython3 --no-cache-dir

Then we classicaly install the VTK Python wrapper, PyQt version 5 and Mayavi 4.5.0 
pip3 install VTK --no-cache-dir 
pip3 install pyQt5 --no-cache-dir 
pip3 install mayavi  --no-cache-dir

And finally, one can upgrade the Mayavi pyface and traitsui from their git repository 
pip3 install git+https://github.com/enthought/mayavi.git 
pip3 install git+https://github.com/enthought/pyface.git 
pip3 install git+https://github.com/enthought/traitsui.git

To quickly test the mayavi package, one can run the python code mayavi_boy.py (774 bytes) . 
wget http://www.math.univ-paris13.fr/~cuvelier/docs/Informatique/Python/mayavi_boy.py 
python3 mayavi_boy.py