Thanks, Benjamin, I am getting a handle on this. I've written my own Python modules before, and have installed them using distutils. So I know that procedure. I just downloaded the Numpy 1.4.0 tarball, and I succeeded in installing it. A program I wrote which depends on numpy ran successfully from SCIte. I'll move on to matplotlib and biopython next.
I also succeeded in running both the Python 2.6 and the Python 2.5 interpreters from the terminal prompt as you suggested. Not sure whether I'll need to play with .bashrc yet. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
