Installation

Pycha needs PyCairo to works since it uses the Cairo graphics library. If you use Linux you will probably already have it installed so you don’t have to do anything. If you use Windows these are the recommended steps for installing PyCairo:

1. Grab the latest PyCairo Windows installer from http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/binaries/win32/pycairo/ You need to use the one that matches your Python version so take the one ending in -py2.4.exe for Python 2.4 or the one ending in -py2.5.exe for Python 2.5
2. Install it in your Python environment (just follow the installation program instructions)
3. Put the Cairo dlls inside the pycairo directory inside your site-packages directory or anywhere in your path. You can find the dlls at http://www.gimp.org/%7Etml/gimp/win32/downloads.html Go there and download the following packages:
   1. cairo.zip. You just need the libcairo-2.dll file inside that zip
   2. libpng.zip. You just need the libpng13.dll file inside that zip
   3. zlib.zip. You just need the zlib1.dll file inside that zip

Pycha is distributed as a Python Egg so is quite easy to install. You just need to type the following command:

easy_install pycha

And Easy Install will go to the Cheeseshop and grab the last pycha for you. If will also install it for you at no extra cost :-)

Alternate method: buildout

You can use buildout to compile and build pycha dependencies automatically. To do so just type a couple of commands:

python bootstrap.py --distribute
bin/buildout

At the end of the process you will have a python interpreter at bin/py with pycha in its PYTHONPATH ready to be imported.