In the Cygwin setup (note, you can rerun setup to install/update additional packages), install: pkg-config ghostscript libfreetype-devel libpng-devel python-gtk2.0 libgtk2.0-devel gcc-g++ openbox python-numpy python-setuptools Restarting Cygwin, run: easy_install-2.7 https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/archive/master.zip This may take some time to build. To confirm matplotlib was built correctly, in python, type: import matplotlib