fenics with EPD

I don't know much about EPD but this might help you out:

http://atinfinity.wordpress.com/2011/08/05/epd-python-on-ubuntu/

This nearly solved my problem, and this addressed a bunch of other minor inconveniences with a much more efficient workaround than what I had been doing. My python distribution is aware that it has dolfin, but when I try to run

>>>> from dolfin import *

I get:

ImportError: /usr/lib/libpetsc.so.3.1: undefined symbol: H5Pset_dxpl_mpio

It seems to be unhappy with this line:
                _mod = imp.load_module('_cpp', fp, pathname, description)

I may be able to figure this out myself. I'll revisit this problem tomorrow.

For me, the H5Pset_dxpl_mpio symbol is defined in /usr/lib/libhdf5.so.6 and /usr/lib/libpetsc.so.3.1 is dynamically linked to it.

Well, it seems when I put /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages in my PYTHONPATH, numpy and a bunch of other stuff gets imported from the Ubuntu python distro rather than EPD. If I could figure out a way to prioritize libraries from the EPD path, I think it would fix this problem.

Try to put it at the end of PYTHOHNPATH.

Putting it at the end of PYTHONPATH still put in the the middle of sys.path after starting the interpreter because of the EPD default path variable. I used sys.path.remove to remove it from the middle, and then I used sys.path.append to append it to the path. The same error still happens.

I reinstalled Ubuntu completely from scratch, and now dolfin works with EPD after I compiled and installed it locally within ~/.local. I have no idea why this works.