Conda

Conda is a powerful package manager and environment manager. It has a large collection of packages that often are newer than what's installed on your system.

Conda packages are neatly contained under your home directory in an environment. Adding or removing packages does not require root access or server admin.

These Conda environments are most helpful when a package cant be installed globally because it could cause breakage with other users or when you need multiple versions of a package.

Getting started

See the below "Miniconda quick start guide" or the Conda guide: https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/getting-started.html

I advise miniconda over anaconda because it takes a minimalistic approach.

Miniconda quick start guide

Here is a short guide to get you started. Feel free to use a different tag than "mymath".

# Install
wget https://repo.anaconda.com/miniconda/Miniconda3-py39_4.10.3-Linux-x86_64.sh
chmod +x Miniconda3-py39_4.10.3-Linux-x86_64.sh
./Miniconda3-py39_4.10.3-Linux-x86_64.sh

# Run the following to have the conda command available on your shell
source ~/miniconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.sh
# if using tchs|csh: source ~/miniconda3/etc/profile.d/conda.csh

# HINT: you can add the source script to ~/.bashrc or ~/.cshrc so conda is available on next login.

# It is advised to create an environment for each project.
# If you skip this these steps everything will get installed directly in ~/miniconda3 
conda create --name mymath
conda activate mymath

# examples installing packages into the activate environment:
conda install mkl gcc_linux-64
conda install openblas
conda install scipy numpy imageio ipython matplotlib