Install scipy on Solaris

When trying to install scipy via pip on Solaris you may encounter this error:

numpy.distutils.system_info.NotFoundError: No lapack/blas resources found.    

There’s a simple way to resolve this but it’s not immediately obvious. BLAS (Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms) and LAPACK (Linear Algebra Something Something…?) are actually provided by the Solaris math and perf libraries, so installing those and setting a couple of environment variables will get scipy and numpy up and running for us on Solaris.


pkg install sunperf system/library/math virtualenv gcc system/header 

virtualenv-3.7 /export/venv
. /export/venv/bin/activate

BLAS=/usr/lib/libsunperf.so; export BLAS
LAPACK=/usr/lib/libsunmath.so ; export LAPACK

pip install numpy scipy 

Python 3.7 is in more SRU’s. It’s best practice to use virtualenv to create a virtual environment to work on rather than installing into the system site-packages. I’ve seen a few users make a mess of the packaging system by updating the system python libraries with pip so please just don’t do it 🙂

Tested on a SPARC-M7 T7-1 kernel zone running 11.4.24.0.1.75.0

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