Thanks for the responses. I did firedrake-install on my mac. I am redoing the firedrake-update with PYTHONPATH clear and suspect that will do the trick. Thanks David. On my ubuntu machine I tried firedrake-update and that seemed much easier (will do that in the future). I followed instructions from the Feb 4 email (by Miklos) cd to the top directory of the firedrake virtualenv . ./bin/activate cd src/firedrake/ git pull ./scripts/firedrake-install --rebuild-script --your-install-options Replace --your-install-options with the options you used to install Firedrake. Then run: firedrake-update --clean This is clear but one problem is that I don't remember what options I installed. Is there a way of figuring that out? I know that someone recommended something involving petsc but have not been able to track down the options. Thanks again. Francis