Installing pycairo under ubuntu

Question

For some reason I can't get python to find cairo.

When I did ./waf configure I got

Setting top to                           : /home/user/pycairo/py2cairo-1.10.0
Setting out to                           : /home/user/pycairo/py2cairo-1.10.0/build_directory
./configure()
Checking for 'gcc' (c compiler)          : ok
Checking for program python              : /usr/bin/python
Checking for python version              : (2, 7, 2, 'final', 0)
Checking for library python2.7           : yes
Checking for program python2.7-config    : /usr/bin/python2.7-config
Checking for header Python.h             : yes
Checking for program pkg-config          : /usr/bin/pkg-config
Checking for 'cairo' >= 1.10.0           : yes
Configuration:
PREFIX                                   : /usr/local
LIBDIR                                   : /usr/local/lib

So next I ran ./waf install.

tried

import cairo
ImportError: No module named cairo

Now I am pretty stumped on what to do next. I checked /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages and it is there but that is the only package there. I also noticed "dist-packages" which I think that is where it's meant to go?

any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

What is wrong with using the packaged version, with full Ubuntu support?

http://packages.ubuntu.com/python-cairo

Python bindings for the Cairo vector graphics library

http://packages.ubuntu.com/python-gi-cairo

Python Cairo bindings for the GObject library

The "latest" way of using Cairo should be via gobject introspection (second package):

from gi.repository import cairo

which uses mostly auto-generated API from the GI repository that is consistent across various programming languages.