The easiest way to install any Python package is through PyPI. So, matplotlib is not an exception and we installed it on a CentOS (v6.4) machine without any errors (of course after updating numpy).
But when we tried to plot something we couldn’t see anything. This is actually a backend issue, and when we installed matplotlib there was no support for any backend (except the default agg which is supplied with matplotlib).
To solve this, we first installed the pygtk-dev version and then re-istalled matplotlib, through
pip install matplotlib
which was build now with the GTKAgg as default backend.
Happy plotting !