Sorry, I should have explicitly stated most of this:
> This is on Redhat 9.0. I built numarray and
> matplotlib myself.
> Initially the matplotlib build had problems finding
> the numarray headers since I have to install
> everything to a non-standard place (I don't have
> root) and simply modifying basedir in setupext.py
> did not work. I made some sym-links and added to an
> include_dir to fix that and now there are no build
> problems.
> My .matplotlibrc is identical to the one put in
> share/matplotlib except numerix is set to 'numarray'
> and set datapath to '/local/share/matplotlib' which
> is where all the fonts and stuff are.
If you are running interactively from the python shell, you need to
make sure "interactive" is set to True in your rc file and do not use
show.
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/faq.html#SHOW
Also, to work interactively, you must use either the tkagg backend or
a python shell that supports threading for the GUI you are using (GTK
or WX) such as ipython http://ipython.scipy.org, which has explicit
support for matplotlib in the pylab mode
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/interactive.html
To test your installation, cd into the examples dir and try running
simple_plot.py from the unix shell.
> cd examples
> python simple_plot.py
OR you can choose your backend from the shell with
> python simple_plot.py -dTkAgg
> python simple_plot.py -dGTKAgg
If that works, almost surely you have an interactive problem that will
be cleared up with the links above. If now, rerun the script with
--verbose-helpful and report back.
Good luck,
JDH