title: hdf5 / h5py ImportError: libhdf5.so.7
body: <p>I'm working on a project involving network messaging queues (msgpack, zmq, ...) on a RHEL 6.3 (x86_64) system. I was installing the most recent packages of glib, gevent, pygobject, pygtk, and such in order to get pylab / matplotlib to work (which hasn't been successful either).</p>
  
  <p>After giving up I went back to my code and somehow I had managed to wreck my hdf5 / h5py installation - h5py can't find libhdf5.so.7 on import. I immediately reinstalled hdf5-1.8.9 in /usr/local/hdf5 on RHEL 6.3 (x86_64) as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>./configure --prefix=/usr/local/hdf5
  make
  make check
  sudo make install
  make check install
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which seemed to work just fine. Then I went to reinstall h5py (in python 2.7.3):</p>
  
  <pre><code>python2.7 setup.py build --hdf5=/usr/local/hdf5/
  python2.7 setup.py test   # optional
  # sudo python2.7 setup.py install
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which fails to import the _errors file in the tests, like so:</p>
  
  <pre><code>======================================================================
  ERROR: _hl.tests.test_attrs_data (unittest.loader.ModuleImportFailure)
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  ImportError: Failed to import test module: _hl.tests.test_attrs_data
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/unittest/loader.py", line 252, in _find_tests
      module = self._get_module_from_name(name)
    File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/unittest/loader.py", line 230, in _get_module_from_name
      __import__(name)
    File "/home/cronburg/Downloads/h5py-2.0.1/build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/h5py/_hl/tests/test_attrs_data.py", line 5, in &lt;module&gt;
      import h5py
    File "/home/cronburg/Downloads/h5py-2.0.1/build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.7/h5py/__init__.py", line 1, in &lt;module&gt;
      from h5py import _errors
  ImportError: libhdf5.so.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
  
  
  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
  Ran 12 tests in 0.001s
  
  FAILED (errors=12)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>h5py was working fine before I went to install the aforementioned packages / tarballs, and I don't remember touching anything that even remotely looked like hdf5. Any ideas?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT:
  Trying to locate the file only shows it in the location i untarred it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>cronburg@rhel:~/Downloads/h5py-2.0.1$ locate libhdf5.so.7
  /home/cronburg/tmp/hdf5-1.8.9/hdf5/lib/libhdf5.so.7
  /home/cronburg/tmp/hdf5-1.8.9/hdf5/lib/libhdf5.so.7.0.3
  /home/cronburg/tmp/hdf5-1.8.9/src/.libs/libhdf5.so.7
  /home/cronburg/tmp/hdf5-1.8.9/src/.libs/libhdf5.so.7.0.3
  </code></pre>