[HOW-TO] Install working picamera2 on Ubuntu 22.04? (needs python3-libcamera)

How can I achieve a working picamera2 on Ubuntu 22.04?

package python3-picamera2 is not located,
sudo pip3 install picamera2 or just pip3 install picamera2 succeeds but …

import picamera2 complains about missing libcamera:

$ python3
Python 3.10.6 (main, Aug 10 2022, 11:40:04) [GCC 11.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import picamera2
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/picamera2/__init__.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .configuration import CameraConfiguration, StreamConfiguration
  File "/home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/picamera2/configuration.py", line 1, in <module>
    from .controls import Controls
  File "/home/ubuntu/.local/lib/python3.10/site-packages/picamera2/controls.py", line 4, in <module>
    from libcamera import ControlType, Size, Rectangle
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'libcamera'

I have installed libcamera (I thought):

$ dpkg -l | grep libcamera
ii  libcamera-dev:arm64                               0~git20200629+e7aa92a-9                 arm64        complex camera support library (development files)
ii  libcamera-tools                                   0~git20200629+e7aa92a-9                 arm64        complex camera support library (tools)
ii  libcamera0:arm64                                  0~git20200629+e7aa92a-9                 arm64        complex camera support library
ubuntu@ROS2HH:~/systests/picamera2$ 

BUT cannot install python3-libcamera:

$ sudo pip3 install python3-libcamera
ERROR: Could not find a version that satisfies the requirement python3-libcamera (from versions: none)
ERROR: No matching distribution found for python3-libcamera
ubuntu@ROS2HH:~/systests/picamera2$ 

How can I achieve a working picamera2 on Ubuntu 22.04?

[chrisruk]

Today I spent some time installing Ubuntu (I found https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi and installed the recommended desktop version, 22.10)

Ubuntu seems to use python3.10, and there appears to be no way to install python3.9 via a deb package currently.

Unfortunately it seems because the picamera2 packages depend on python3.9 it won’t be possible currently to install via ‘apt’.

One package for example libcamera is compiled against python3.9, so although I tried to bypass the python3.9 requirement by downloading the .deb files and doing something like sudo dpkg --ignore-depends=python3, it still wouldn’t function correctly, as the library itself is designed using python3.9.

So currently it looks like you’d need to build libcamera etc. from source for Ubuntu’s python 3.10.

[davidplowman]

@SeanDuffie Hi, thank you for the question. It looks like you’re using a standard Raspberry Pi OS and not Ubuntu, and that your problems relate to using conda, is that correct? Would you be able to open a new issue so that we can avoid getting two different things mixed up in this thread? Thank you very much!