Installing sage (http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.sagemath.org/) addresses the installation effort pretty well. You get a giant binary of everything bundle

Installing sage (http://www.sagemath.org/ http://www.sagemath.org/) addresses the installation effort pretty well. You get a giant binary of everything bundled together and working. It addresses the programming environment to some degres (it gives you a "notebook" similar to Mathematica). I used to be a hardcore matlab guy, now I find some tasks are easier in python.