John, I don't know about your experience with debian, but 'stable' doesn't come with the version needed. If I build freetype from scratch, pygtk would need to be rebuilt as well as Gtk etc. etc. I have done this and it isn't a solution. That leaves me with TkAgg, which I don't want. Wx is not really a solution either, as it is slow and heavy - I have to cater for P3-450Mhz style systems debian is supposed to solve these issues, but Unfortunately, I can't see a solution to this problem, other than to wait for testing to be declared stable in three months after three months after three months... Cheers, Malte. John Hunter wrote: > >There's no need to upgrade the operating system, but you will need to >upgrade freetype. I recommend freetype 2.1.9 - 2.1.7 is required by >matplotlib, but 2.1.9 fixes some bugs. > >With debian, a simple > > > sudo apt-get install freetype freetype-dev > >should do the trick. > > >If your sysadmins won't do this for you, you can always compile a >version in your home dir. > >