I needed to get pyibmtts working for the new Tar Heel Reader installation over at ibiblio.org. I couldn't install ibmtts in the usual /opt place over there because I don't have root access (and only I'm authorized to use it anyway). To make it work, I installed ibmtts in $HOME/opt and $HOME/var. And I hacked the paths in $HOME/var/IBM/ibmtts/cfg/eci.ini to point to the libraries. I modified Pete's setup.py for pyibmtts to add $HOME to the search paths and one tricky bit. To help it find the shared libraries that are part of ibmtts I set the LD_RUN_PATH environment variable to point to the ibmtts lib folder. I understand from this page that setting this environment variable at compile time causes the search path to be encoded into the shared library.

Here is the area of setup.py that I modified:

LIBS = ['ibmeci']

HOME = os.environ['HOME']

os.environ['LD_RUN_PATH'] = os.path.join(HOME, 'opt/IBM/ibmtts/lib')

if sys.platform.startswith('linux'):
  INC_DIRS = [os.path.join('../'),
              os.path.join(HOME, 'opt/IBM/ibmtts', 'inc'), 
              os.path.join(HOME, 'opt/IBM/ibmtts-devel', 'inc')]
  LIB_DIRS = [os.path.join('../'),
              os.path.join(HOME, 'opt/IBM/ibmtts', 'lib'),
              os.path.join(HOME, 'opt/IBM/ibmtts-devel', 'lib')]
elif sys.platform == 'win32':

I also had to link eci.ini into the folder with my python code in order to properly find it. I bet updateECI is supposed to fix that but I couldn't figure out how to run it.