installing matplotlib on ubuntu?

I have:

Ubuntu 8.04 python 2.5.2 installed on this Ubuntu matplotlib 0.92.0 installed

I want to upgrade to (atleast) matplotlib 0.99 so that I can do 3d plotting.

The synaptic package (also the command line apt-get) tells me that whatever I have is the latest matplotlib (which is n开发者_Python百科ot true).

How can I install matplotlib 0.99 or matplotlib 1.0.1 ?

You have the latest available package version for your operating system. Given that Ubuntu is at version 11 now and you are using 8.04, the version difference in the matplotlib package might not come as very surprising.

As for installing the newest version, I'd suggest reading:

http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/faq/installing_faq.html

...if all fails, you can always install from source.

Note that support for Desktop versions of 8.04 LTS is due to expire shortly -- if this is a desktop machine, perhaps the easiest answer is to upgrade to 10.04 LTS, 10.10, or the very-soon-upcoming 11.04 release (or whatever they'll call the next release). Maybe not "the easiest answer", but an answer that includes security updates for Mozilla, Adobe Flash, the Kernel, and so forth.

Many newer versions of packages are supported via the Ubuntu Backports facility, but I didn't spot python-matplotlib in the list of available packages. Perhaps they would provide it if you asked nicely, perhaps it would be too much work.

You can always try installing newer versions from newer releases, but newer versions of python and libraries might introduce worse problems. (But probably will work fine.) See the apt_preferences(5) manpage for details on how to configure multiple APT sources and select some specific packages from a newer distribution (pinning), and rely on the older distribution for all the other packages.

Jim's answer of building the version you need from source is probably your best second option, if installing a newer version of the distribution is too daunting / otherwise impossible at this point.