Joel's dev blog

Updating python 3 on an outdated Ubuntu

March 13, 2019

⏳ 4 min read

The problem

Sometimes you cannot easily change the version of Ubuntu and python if you are running them on cloud. I am using cloud9, as you might have expected, because I’m still in the Navy, without any personal devices. I cannot go home to open up my laptop to do anything better.

The version of Ubuntu and python were both too not satisfiable. I had to update the version of python on Ubuntu 14.04.5:

$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description:    Ubuntu 14.04.5 LTS
Release:        14.04
Codename:       trusty

$ python3 --version
Python 3.4.3

The python version was not enough for me to do some works on Jupyter notebook. I needed python^3.7.

and below command did not work at all for me:

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get upgrade

$ sudo apt-get install python3.7
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package python3.7
E: Couldn't find any package by regex 'python3.7'

same for python3.6.

So I searched up and I think I found a solution.

Solution

use the python distribution from deadsnakes’ PPA

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python3.7

These lines of commands worked for me!

PPA

But what’s PPA in linux? Again I searched.

PPA stands for Personal Package Archive.

Ubuntu controls software and its version too. But a new release of software does not of course get immediately reflected by Ubuntu (for stability, safety, etc). But if you really want to get it, you then get to use PPA!

Therefore, PPA’s not official, it’s personal to the developer.

Ubuntu provides a platform called Launchpad that enables software developers to create their own repositories.

Yeah. So even you can add a repo to Launchpad.

So this is what you actually did:

$ sudo apt-get install software-properties-common # ?
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:deadsnakes/ppa # adds the PPA repository to the list.
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install python3.7 # installs the package

software-properties-common

Then what’s software-properties-common?

This software provides an abstraction of the used apt repositories. It allows you to easily manage your distribution and independent software vendor software sources.

Without it, you would need to add and remove repositories (such as PPAs) manually by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and/or any subsidiary files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d

Yes. Yeap. In short, it provides an easy and useful mechanism for you to add/remove PPAs. So you need them.

Switching python version

But if I enter python3 --version, it would show me:

Python 3.4.3

So how do I get it pointed to python3.7 I have just newly installed?

Get python3.7 kernel on Jupyter notebook

The Jupyter team maintains the IPython kernel since the Jupyter notebook server depends on the IPython kernel functionality.

So in fact I didn’t actually need to upgrade python version on Ubuntu. But anyways, that was a good piece of knowledge.

Then how do I get it on my Jupyter.

python3 -m pip install ipykernel
python3 -m ipykernel install --user

Ahh. Another error came up!!!!

$ sudo python3.7 -m pip install ipykernel                                                                                         
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 183, in _run_module_as_main
    mod_name, mod_spec, code = _get_module_details(mod_name, _Error)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 142, in _get_module_details
    return _get_module_details(pkg_main_name, error)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.7/runpy.py", line 109, in _get_module_details
    __import__(pkg_name)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/__init__.py", line 59, in <module>
    from pip.log import logger
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/log.py", line 9, in <module>
    import colorama, pkg_resources
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 983, in _find_and_load
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 967, in _find_and_load_unlocked
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 668, in _load_unlocked
  File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 638, in _load_backward_compatible
  File "/usr/share/python-wheels/setuptools-3.3-py2.py3-none-any.whl/pkg_resources.py", line 1479, in <module>
    register_loader_type(importlib_bootstrap.SourceFileLoader, DefaultProvider)
AttributeError: module 'importlib._bootstrap' has no attribute 'SourceFileLoader'

Now I’m fully exhausted. Returning next time to solve this problem. At least I got python3.7 working on Ubuntu. I wish if I could use my laptop to just create an environment with conda or virtualenv to setup a project with a dedicated python version… or docker or whatever.

Written by Joel Mun. Joel likes Typescript, React, Node.js, GoLang, Python, Wasm and more. He also loves to enlarge the boundaries of his knowledge, mainly by reading books and watching lectures on Youtube. Guitar and piano are necessities at his home.

© Joel Mun 2023