Thoughts On Ubuntu 22.04 (UPDATED)

 So here I am a few days ago, sitting at my computer, working on a project, and a pop-up appears asking me that Ubuntu 22.04 had been release, asking if I wanted to upgrade to it.  (Yes, I know that I can limit what I am notified of, I actually choose to know when the latest is available).  

I think, "Sure, why not." and clicked through the plethora of buttons to get it up upgrade (agreeing to the upgrade no less than 3 or 4 times). So my machine goes into upgrading and I decide to let it do its thing.  An hour or so later, I return and its at a login prompt, as it had rebooted.  Only, the login page is now dark themed.  Very nice!!!  The upgrade results were starting off on a good note.  

While its just a lot of packages that were upgraded, as well as the underlying software, I will say that there was an extremely annoying side-effect of this upgrade.  I have some projects that I have setup, including having done pip installs of packages and such for the software.  It seems that during the upgrade, all of those packages and settings went away.  Seriously?  Just *POOF*?  What the heck, Ubuntu?  Way to blow away my installs and configs.  

So, I had to spend some time re-setting up the stuff I regularly used (and some I was working on).  All of the items, by the way, were already using Python 3, so nothing except a newer version being installed.  

I just wanted to share this annoyance, in case you are planning on upgrading.  You will need to plan on some extra time, re-setting up some things once the upgrade completes.

UPDATE:  After some research, and noting issues seen on other machines (non-ubuntu) and work systems, this seems to be something related to a python3 upgrade.  On my work Mac, it seems that Python3 upgraded, and put itself in a different location, but did not take on what was previously installed.  It caused a ton of confusion in my system.  There were two different versions of pip3 and two different versions of python3.  It took using 'which -a' to figure this out and zero in on the issue.  In the end, I had to use an alias for each on my Mac to set things right.  

Here on my Ubuntu system though, the python3 upgrade simply wiped out everything that was installed with the previous python3 installation, that wasn't part of the standard library.  Thanks for that.  Way to seriously cause broken software that is used constantly.

'_remove_dead_weakref' error after upgrading to Ubuntu 17.10

Well, after finally getting my Flask app running and returning data, I upgraded my system to Ubuntu 17.10 (from 17.04).  Today, I tried to start my flask app and was greeted with a bunch of Python error output and the following error:

ImportError: cannot import name '_remove_dead_weakref'

I was baffled as the app worked the day before.  So after some digging around the Googles, I found that the issue was caused by my upgrade to 17.10.

The fix....... delete your virtual environment and rebuild it.  I am not saying delete your project directory, I am saying delete your envs directory (which is where the executables for the virtual environment are.  Some people put it in the same directory.  If you are like me, you have a central location where you keep them. 

You will need to remove that entire directory, rebuild it and then re-run the virtualenv command to create the virtualized environment and then install any modules that you had previously installed (as they get stored in the directory structure you just deleted.  After that, your app and its parts should work fine.

Python pip Broken After Upgrade To OSx El Capitan

Wow its been a long time since I blogged.  I have no excuse other than things have been a touch crazy.  My work recently started allowing us to upgrade our Mac's from Yosemite to El Capitan.  For me the upgrade only took about 45 minutes, which is pretty quick in the grand scheme of things.  The download is a little over 6 gb and went pretty quickly.  

I was going along fine until today when I tried to install a new module using pip.  About 1/2 way through the installation I was presented with the following output:

    In file included from src/lxml/lxml.etree.c:321:
    src/lxml/includes/etree_defs.h:14:10: fatal error: 'libxml/xmlversion.h' file not found
    #include "libxml/xmlversion.h"
             ^
    1 error generated.
    Compile failed: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1
    creating tmp
    cc -I/usr/include/libxml2 -I/usr/include/libxml2 -c /tmp/xmlXPathInitf3OxN6.c -o tmp/xmlXPathInitf3OxN6.o
    /tmp/xmlXPathInitf3OxN6.c:1:10: fatal error: 'libxml/xpath.h' file not found
    #include "libxml/xpath.h"
             ^
    1 error generated.
    *********************************************************************************
    Could not find function xmlCheckVersion in library libxml2. Is libxml2 installed?
    Perhaps try: xcode-select --install
    *********************************************************************************
    error: command 'cc' failed with exit status 1
    ----------------------------------------
Command "/usr/bin/python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/private/tmp/pip-build-9IduXA/lxml/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-RgavmY-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile" failed with error code 1 in /private/tmp/pip-build-9IduXA/lxml/

I had installed other modules last week, but then I realized that that was prior to my upgrading.  I looked at the above output and noticed the line:

     Perhaps try: xcode-select --install

OF COURSE!!!  Although I upgraded, and XCode had been upgraded to, I still needed to do some things with XCode to get things going again.  First, I opened XCode and went through its initial startup after an upgrade.  A bunch of clicking and things were good there.  I then opened up my command line and, prefixing the command with 'sudo', I ran the 'xcode-select --install' command from above.  This presented me a pop-up window to install tools.  So, I accepted and allowed it to install.  Once finished, I tried my pip module installation again and VOILA!!!!  It worked!!!

So, in this lesson, always make sure to update your XCode and xcode-select before moving on after an upgrade.