You’ll need Python before doing anything else. Most Linux distributions already have this installed, but you can use this to check:
$ which python
/usr/bin/python
To use the graphing features of CSVSee, you’ll need matplotlib. On Ubuntu, this should work:
$ sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib
If you want to install an official release, first download one from the downloads page, and extract it somewhere.
Then, open that directory in a terminal and run:
$ sudo python setup.py install
Or use pip:
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
$ sudo pip install .
One advantage of using pip is that you can uninstall later like so:
$ sudo pip uninstall CSVSee
If you’d rather use a copy of the latest development version, clone it using Git:
$ git clone git://github.com/a-e/csvsee.git
then install as before using setup.py or pip.
There are some hassles when installing CSVSee’s dependencies in a virtualenv. Specifically, NumPy and matplotlib must be compiled from source, requiring extra development headers and other dependencies that are not easily installable using pip. For this reason, it’s strongly recommended that you just install NumPy and matplotlib through your regular package manager (like apt-get).
If you really want to install them in a virtualenv, you could try this:
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev libpng-dev
In order to display an interactive graphing window, you’ll also need a GUI backend that matplotlib can use. Qt4, Gtk, and Tkinter should all work. I use Qt4:
$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4
Then you may be able to do:
$ pip install numpy
$ pip install matplotlib
But I make no promises. In fact, I couldn’t get it to work, so if you manage to do so, please open an issue describing how you did it, so I can include it in this documentation.