Scipy.integrate ODEPACK import error solved!

January 14, 2009

I recently found a solution to a problem that had been vexing me for about a year. In order to successfully import anything from scipy.integrate, I had edit the file scipy/integrate/__init__.py and comment out the line

from odepack import *

If not, I would get various import errors such as

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/scipy/integrate/__init__.py", line 10,
in <module>
    from odepack import *
  File "/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/scipy/integrate/odepack.py", line 7,
in <module>
    import _odepack
ImportError: /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/scipy/integrate/_odepack.so:
undefined symbol: daxpy_

I found the solution in Gentoo bug 251165. The problem only occurs when Scipy is built with non-reference versions of BLAS and CBLAS. The solution is to install the reference implementation of BLAS and CBLAS, rebuild Scipy, and then use whichever implementation of BLAS or CBLAS you want. I don’t know why this happens, and I don’t know if it affects distributions other than Gentoo. By the way, Gentoo has a really useful system tool called eselect, which has various modules that are used to choose between different versions or implementations of tools on your system (BLAS, Java virtual machine, kernel sources, OpenGL, etc.)

Comments

Comment #1 by sabujp

sabujp - Nov 3, 2011

yes it affects other distros