Workaround for PiCockpit on Ubuntu

Note: this is a work in progress, another problem has cropped up which needs to be looked at! Currently picockpit will not work on Ubuntu, unfortunately.

A user tried to install PiCockpit on Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi, and contacted me with the following problem:

Setting up picockpit-client (2.0.1) …
cp: cannot stat ‘/usr/bin/python3.7‘: No such file or directory
cp: cannot stat ‘/usr/bin/python3.7’: No such file or directory
WARNING: Some error occured while updating
/usr/share/picockpit-client/bin/python3
picockpit-client.service is a disabled or a static unit, not starting it.
Could not find platform independent libraries
Could not find platform dependent libraries
Consider setting $PYTHONHOME to [:]
Fatal Python error: initfsencoding: Unable to get the locale encoding
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘encodings’

Current thread 0xb6ef8970 (most recent call first):
bash: line 15: 28213 Aborted sudo picockpit-client connect –yes

This problem is due to the picockpit-client depending on Python version 3.7. Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS has Python version 3.8.

You can try to work around this problem, before re-running the installation for picockpit-client, by running the following command:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3.8 /usr/bin/python3.7

Note that this is a rather “dirty” workaround, as it will suggest to applications that a newer Python version is actually an older version. It seems a bit challenging currently to change the way the Debian / Raspberry Pi OS package is built, I will investigate further if more users inquire about PiCockpit not working on Ubuntu. Possibly there will be a separate package;

possibly I will also include an option for the symlink in the setup.sh script.

After executing the command above, you can install PiCockpit using the one-liner:

bash -c "$(curl -k -s https://picockpit.com/setup.sh)"

Here you will run into another problem, “ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘picockpit-client'” – I will investigate this, if further users ask me to make PiCockpit available on Ubuntu.