ipython notebook on RHEL 6?

Question

I'm currently trying to setup a ipython notebook server as a common place for several researchers to collaborate. I've successfully set this up on a an Ubuntu installation on a VMWare VM on Windows 7. But to make this more "robust", I'm attempting to run this on a server supported by our technology group. Our technology group insists on paying for a license, and consequently they've stood up a VM running RHEL 6 and have given me admin privileges.

My question is: can I set up ipython notebook server on RHEL 6? Should it be a difficult task?

I have several potential points of failure:

1. I'm behind a proxy and have had to work with our security team to get appropriate ports open to be able to update via 'yum update'
2. Using RHEL 6 and after including the EPEL repository, I still can't seem to find appropriate packages for ipython-notebook.
3. I'm not a linux admin. I dabble and figure stuff out, but a guru I am not.

If RHEL 6 isn't the appropriate distribution to run notebook, then I need to know that so I can get access to something more appropriate. If it is viable, then I need some direction on what the expected setup process is.

Answer 1

If you have all the prerequisites installed, then ipython can simply be installed using easy_install without needing a package. Details of how to do this are given in the ipython documentation - you should take note of both the general ipython requirements and the notebook specific ones.

The major thing which might cause a hassle is pyzmq. This will involve compiling and installing the zeromq C libraries, which obviously require C compilers etc. I think by default the pyzmq installer tries to do this for you, but if it fails then you may have to do this compilation manually.

If you don't have root access to your machine, or if you want to test things before mucking around with system libraries, then I suggest using virtualenv to create an isolated python package directory in your own home directory.

Answer 2

On RHEL or CentOS 6 you can install IPython with yum if you have EPEL enabled:

yum install python-ipython* python-argparse python-zmq

Once that's done you can start your notebook server (as a non-root user):

ipython notebook