How to fix "module 'platform' has no attribute 'linux_distribution'" when installing new packages with Python3.8?

I had Python versions of 2.7 and 3.5. I wanted the install a newer version of Python which is python 3.8. I am using Ubuntu 16.04 and I can not just uninstall Python 3.5 due to the dependencies. So in order to run my scripts, I use python3.8 app.py. No problem so far. But when I want to install new packages via pip:

python3.8 -m pip install pylint 

It throws an error:

AttributeError: module 'platform' has no attribute 'linux_distribution' 

So far, I tried:

sudo update-alternatives --config python3 

and chose python3.8 and run command by starting with python3 but no luck.

Then:

sudo ln -sf /usr/bin/python3.5 /usr/bin/python3 

I also tried running the command by starting with python3 but it did not work either.

How can I fix it so that I can install new packages to my new version of Python?

7 Answers

It looks like at least on my Ubuntu 16.04, pip is shared for all Python versions in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip.

This is what I did to get it working again:

• sudo apt remove python3-pip
• sudo python3.8 -m easy_install pip

You might want to install the python 3.5 version of pip again with sudo python3.5 -m easy_install pip.

Python 3.8 removed some stuff. I solved my problems with pip (specifically pip install) by installing pip with curl.

What worked for me was downloading get-pip.py and run it with Python 3.8:

curl -o get-pip.py python3.8 get-pip.py 

Source:

The problem is that package.linux_distribution was deprecated starting with Python 3.5(?). and removed altogether for Python 3.8.

Use the distro package instead. This package only works on Linux however.

I ran into this problem after installing OpenCobolIDE on Linux Mint 20, having upgraded Python to the latest level. have submitted a code fix to the OpenCobolIDE author to review and test. I was able to get the IDE to start up and run with this fix.

Essentially the fix uses the distro package if available, otherwise it uses the old platform package. For example:

This code imports distro if available:

import platform using_distro = False try: import distro using_distro = True except ImportError: pass 

Then you can test the value of using_distro to determine whether to get the linux distro type from package or distro, for example:

if using_distro: linux_distro = distro.like() else: linux_distro = platform.linux_distribution()[0] 

Check if your wheels installation is old. I was getting this same error and fixed it with

python3.8 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

Pylint seems to work on python3.8

In my case, removing python-pip-whl package helped:

apt-get remove python-pip-whl 

It removed also pip and virtualenv, so I had to install them again:

curl | python3 pip install virtualenv 

I recently had this error and it turns out that I had a package called platform at a folder on my path ahead of the standard library and so the interpreter imported that instead. Check your path to what it is that you're actually importing.

If you have this issue when running a docker-compose up command. The solutions above do not work. You should install docker ce ()