Pyminuit2 is a python interface to the Minuit2 package which comes with ROOT. It can be installed without ROOT but requires that the user install the stand alone Minuit2 package. Here I assume you have followed the installation procedure for ROOT found here.
Pyminuit is very easy to use and appears to converge much faster than scipy.optimize.fmin which is the other option for minimizing functions in my setup. You can get more information on the setup here.
Installation of pyminuit2 is very simple. Obtain the code via an svn checkout:
svn checkout http://pyminuit2.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pyminuit2-read-only
or download the latest tagged release from the google code site. The svn checkout seems to the preferred method right now and that is what I used. It only has 15 revisions so the code is stable and seems to have no issues. After obtaining the code enter the directory with the contents (if you checked out with the svn checkout command above it would be just “pyminuit2-read-only”) and attempt a build:
python setup.py build_ext --inplace
Then enter the build directory (“buid”) and some of the examples listed here near the bottom of the page. If those work and you don’t get any errors then your system should be good to go. Next just install the egg from inside the “pyminuit2-read-only” directory:
python setup.py install --prefix=$EXTDIR
