installing Basemap on Centos without root privileges

[bruhwiler]

I ran into a few technical issues, when trying to install Basemap on a Centos Linux box where I did not have root privileges.

This is a very specific case, so I don't know how helpful it will be, but in any case, I documented the instructions in a public 'gist' here:
https://gist.github.com/bruhwiler/5108aecce94da0532c9f275f3b0b4d9d

The step-by-step instructions are a bit overly detailed, because I did this for a student who was not familiar with Linux, nor with the JupyterLab UI.

[molinav]

Thanks for your contribution, @bruhwiler! I know it has been a long time since the issue was open, but I wanted to share with you that the complexity of the installation process has been reduced significantly in the last couple of years. Manylinux wheels are available on PyPI:

python -m pip install basemap

as well as conda-forge packages:

conda install -c conda-forge basemap

This means that the installation can be performed with precompiled binary packages, without the need of building everything from source. The installation procedure is now described in the documentation too:
https://matplotlib.org/basemap/1.4.0/users/installation.html