Installation instructions

For Windows

Download the latest version of Sympathy from the official homepage. If you are using any custom node libraries then make sure to select the same Python version (Python 2 or Python 3) as the libraries have been written for.

After downloading, run the installer and follow the instructions. This will install Sympathy as well as a custom Python version with all dependencies for it.

For Linux

These installation instructions have been written for Ubuntu 16.04 which is the only officially supported Linux distribution for Sympathy for Data. Nonetheless, these instructions should also serve as a starting point for later versions of Ubuntu or other Linux distributions.

Before you start either installation, make sure that your computer is internet connected and has the latest version of all packages. If unsure, run the commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

You can install Sympathy either for Python 3 (recommended) or Python 2.7.

Installing Sympathy for Python 3 under Linux

Start by installing the required prerequisites

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake qt4-default python3-pip python3-pyodbc
sudo -H pip3 install scikit-image
sudo -H pip3 install scikit-learn

Since modern Ubuntu has a later version of Python 3 (3.5 or later) not directly supported by PySide we need to use the version given by the distribution. If you are installing under a non-supported Linux system you can try without this step if your python3 --version shows 3.4 or earlier.

sudo apt-get install python3-pyside
cd /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages
sudo bash -c "cat >PySide-1.2.2.egg-info <<EOF
Metadata-Version: 1.1
Name: PySide
Version: 1.2.2
EOF"

Finally we can download the Sympathy python “wheel” file from the official homepage. Assuming that you have downloaded it as the file “Sympathy-VERSION.whl” you can install it by running the following commands from the folder where you downloaded it:

sudo -H pip3 install Sympathy-VERSION.whl
sudo -H python3 -m sympathy_app syg

Note that the last command launches Sympathy graphically as root so that the installation can be finished. Close without doing anything else and continue by launching Sympathy as a normal user (see below). If you haven’t done so take a look at the Getting started pages in the documentation.

For other Linux distributions than Ubuntu 16.04: if you see any text in red during the above command then some package may be missing. Read the part in red and install the required package before trying again. The preference is always to use a package provided by your distribution (eg. sudo apt-get install python3-xxx), or in second hand one using “pip3” directly (eg. sudo -H pip3 install xxx).

Installing Sympathy for Python 2.7 under Linux

Start by installing the required prerequisites

sudo apt-get install build-essential cmake qt4-default python-pip python-pyodbc
sudo -H pip install scikit-image
sudo -H pip install scikit-learn

As an optional step you can use the distributions version of PySide (a wrapper library for Qt). If you do not perform this step then the installation will recompile a fresh version of PySide – a process which takes about 20 minutes.

sudo apt-get install python-pyside
cd /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages
sudo bash -c "cat >PySide-1.2.2.egg-info <<EOF
Metadata-Version: 1.1
Name: PySide
Version: 1.2.2
EOF"

Finally we can download the Sympathy python wheel file from the official homepage. Assuming that you have downloaded it as the file “Sympathy-VERSION.whl” you can install it by running the following commands from the folder where you downloaded it:

sudo -H pip install Sympathy-VERSION.whl
sudo -H python -m sympathy_app syg

Note that the last command launches Sympathy graphically as root so that the installation can be finished. Close without doing anything else and continue by launching Sympathy as a normal user (see below). If you have not done so take a look at the Getting started pages in the documentation.

For other Linux distributions than Ubuntu 16.04: if you see any text in red during the execution of above command, some package may be missing. Read the part in red and install the required package before trying again. The preference is always to use a package provided by your distribution (eg. sudo apt-get install python-xxx), or at second hand, one using pip directly (eg. sudo -H pip install xxx).

Running Sympathy from Linux

You can run Sympathy from Linux either with a GUI (first command below), or for data processing applications in head-less mode (second command)

For Python 3:

python3 -m sympathy_app syg
python3 -m sympathy_app sy <my workflow>

For Python 2.7:

python -m sympathy_app syg
python -m sympathy_app sy <my workflow>

Finally, you can find the example that are installed with Sympathy under the default installation path:

/usr/local/lib/python3.5/dist-packages/sympathy_app/Library/Examples

Linux specific troubleshooting

If Sympathy hangs when you try to start it with python3 -m sympathy_app syg as a normal user, then it is possible that you have run it once with sudo without the -H flag. This leads to root owning all the cache files. The best way out of this is to run the following commands:

cd
sudo chown -r MYNAME:MYGROUP .cache/Sympathy\ for\ Data/
sudo chown -r MYNAME:MYGROUP .local/share/data/Sympathy\ for\ Data/

Where you need to replace MYNAME and MYGROUP with your username and group (often the same as the username). If this does not solve the problem, try launching Sympathy using the strace command

strace python3 -m sympathy_app syg

This will make alot of printouts of all system calls, you can break with Ctrl-C and look for any permission denied printouts.