Installation Guide
Mystic is written in python, and relies on numpy for several of it's data structures. The plotting package matplotlib is not required by mystic, however several of mystic's tutorial examples do require it to be installed. Note that although the tutorial examples are bundled with the distribution, they are not installed as a package. The examples must be run from the 'mystic-0.2a1/examples' source directory. If pathos is installed, or more specifically, the 'pyina' or 'pathos' subpackages, mystic's global optimizers can be launched in parallel mode on multiple processors, on high-performance computing clusters, and across the web.
The first step is to get the distribution that is best suited for your operating system and version of python. Platform-specific and python-specific versions of this release are available at the bottom of this page.
Installation
Mystic is packaged to install from source, so you must download the tarball, unzip, and run the installer::
[download]
$ tar -xvzf mystic-0.2a1.tgz
$ cd mystic-0.2a1
$ python setup.py build
$ python setup.py install
You will be warned of any missing dependencies and/or settings after you run the "build" step above. Mystic depends on numpy, so you should install it first. Having matplotlib is necessary for running several of the tutorial examples, and you should probably go get it even though it's not required.
Alternately, mystic can be installed with easy_install::
[download]
$ easy_install -f . mystic
For Windows users, source code and examples are available in zip format. A binary installer is also provided::
[download]
[double-click]
Requirements
Mystic requires:
Optional requirements:
- setuptools, version >= 0.6
- matplotlib, version >= 0.91
- pathos, version >= 0.1a1
Versions used by the authors:
- Ubuntu 7.10; python 2.5.2; numpy 1.2.1; setuptools 0.6c9; matplotlib 0.98.5
- Fedora 7; python 2.5.1; numpy 1.0.3.1; setuptools 0.6c8; matplotlib 0.91.2
- MacOS 10.4; python 2.5.2; numpy 1.3.0b1; setuptools 0.6c9; matplotlib 0.98.5.2
- MacOS 10.5; python 2.5.4; numpy 1.3.0; setuptools 0.6c9; matplotlib 0.99.0
- Debian "squeeze"; python 2.5.4; numpy 1.2.1; setuptools 0.6c9; matplotlib 0.98.3
- Windows Vista; python 2.5.4; numpy 1.4.1; matplotlib 1.0.0
Platform Notes
Mystic has been successfully installed from source and tested on linux platforms running python 2.5 and 2.6. It has also been installed and tested on Intel Macintosh running python 2.5 -- there were, however, some issues with the with matplotlib not plotting the dynamic plots (see ticket #36), and easy_install failing on the numpy dependency (see ticket #37). Mystic has also been installed on Windows, however testing on that platform is limited. Mystic has not been installed or tested with earlier versions of python. No binary installers for linux or Macintosh platforms exist at this time.
Downloads
Mystic is licensed under a modified BSD license, and is available as a source distribution or binary distribution. See the Release Notes for a feature summary.
| Filename | Architecture | Python | Size | Date | Tested |
| mystic-0.2a1.tgz | -- | -- | 194 KB | 05/30/10 13:44 | Python2.5 on Fedora, Ubuntu, MacOS, Debian |
| mystic-0.2a1.zip | -- | -- | 324 KB | 07/19/10 16:01 | Python2.5 on Windows Vista |
| mystic-0.2a1.win32.exe | Windows | -- | 141 KB | 07/19/10 16:01 | Python2.5 on Windows Vista |
Prior releases of mystic are available here.
