[viff-devel] Problems installing pyOpenSSL with Python version 2.6.1

[Martin Geisler]

Håvard Vegge <havardv at stud.ntnu.no> writes:

> Yes, VIFF is now installed! (on Windows XP SP3)
>
> First I tried to install all the latest versions, including Python
> 2.6.1. In addition to the fact that PyOpenSSL is not available for
> Python 2.6 yet, two errors occured:
> 1. Executing the simple millionaire program did not work. The first
> error (No module named win32api) was solved by installing Python
> Extensions for Windows:
> http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=78018&package_id=79063
> 2. A second error occured (deprecated hashlib) which I did not manage
> to fix.
>
> So I decided to install Python 2.5 together with the appropriate packages:
> Python 2.5.4
> Twisted 8.2.0 for Python 2.5
> gmpy 1.03 installer for Windows Python 2.5
> Win32 OpenSSL v0.9.8j (also had to install Visual C++ 2008
> Redistributables from the same page in order to install OpenSSL)
> pyOpenSSL installer for Python 2.5
> viff-0.7.1 executable
>
> I was then able to run the millionaire example without problems.

Excellent, that's good to hear! And thank you for writing up your
experience, that will probably be handy for other Windows users.

> By the way, it took a few minutes to locate the viff/apps/ directory
> as explained in the Installation guide / Testing. Since I installed
> the executable, no such directory existed. Found it in the zip
> archive though...

Yeah, that is silly -- we use the standard Python packaging tool,
distutils, to generate these .exe files for us. The idea is that this
is a "binary" distribution, so it leaves out all the example
applications, the HTML help, etc.

Maybe we should just stop making those .exe files until we get a
proper Windows installer. I don't think it would be difficult to make
such an installer -- please see and comment on the discussion here:

  http://tracker.viff.dk/issue14

-- 
Martin Geisler

VIFF (Virtual Ideal Functionality Framework) brings easy and efficient
SMPC (Secure Multiparty Computation) to Python. See: http://viff.dk/.