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How to install a fresh Linux station with Expyriment and Psychopy

Christophe Pallier christophe@pallier.org 11 Oct. 2025

This how-to provides step-by-step instructions to set up a PC with the psychology experiments generators expyriment and psychopy.

1. Install fresh Ubuntu 24.04
   • when asked, choose extented selection of software, and check "installation of third party software" and "support for additional media"
   • create an account "neurostim" with the usual password

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# Check opengl sync to vblank (works both with mesa and nvidia drivers)

sudo apt install mesa-utils   # to get glxgears

glxgears

env vblank_mode=0 __GL_SYNC_TO_VBLANK=0 glxgears

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uv venv
source .venv/bin/activate

uv pip install flit
git clone https://github.com/expyriment/expyriment.git
cd expyriment
uv run flit install

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pyenv install under ubuntu 22.04

sudo apt install curl libssl-dev liblzma-dev libbz2-dev libsqlite3-dev libffi-dev tk-dev
curl https://pyenv.run | bash

cat >> ~/.bashrc <<EOF
export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
[[ -d $PYENV_ROOT/bin ]] && export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
eval "$(pyenv init -)"

eval "$(pyenv virtualenv-init -)"

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expyriment is a great Python library to program psychology experiments.

However pip install expyriment fails with many versions of Python because it tries to recompile pygame

Here we show how to use pyenv to create an environement with Python 3.7.6 in which "pip install expyriment" should work.

Installation

sudo apt install -y python3-pip python-is-python3 python3.10-venv

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Installing a Linux workstation with psychtoolbox, psychopy, expyriment

Author: christophe@pallier.org

Date: 05 Nov 2021

Warning: These instructions work for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focal (will probalby need some modifications for another Ubuntu distribution)

Install some basic packages

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#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>


const char* DELIMITERS = "!\"#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[]^_`{|}~\\\t\n\r ";

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
        FILE* fd;

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/* Play a sound file (wav format) passed on the command line, using libsdl2
 *
 * Time-stamp: <2021-05-26 14:58:39 christophe@pallier.org> 
 *
 * Compile with:
 *   cc -W -Wall $(sdl2-config --cflags) test_playsound.c $(sdl2-config --libs) -o test_playsound
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <SDL2/SDL.h>

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#! /usr/bin/env python3
# Time-stamp: <2019-11-03 10:53:53 christophe@pallier.org>


""" Cleanly format the output of ``du``.

Example:

    du Documents/ | sort -rn | pretty_du | head