Unable to determine if this system is a Raspberry Pi

I have installed official supported Ubuntu server from an official raspberry Pi website and their official guidance (https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/).

Now, I’m trying to install picamera from pip but I’m getting an error: Unable to determine if this system is a Raspberry Pi

uname -r
4.15.0-1031-raspi2

>>> os.uname()
('Linux', 'raspberrya.hostname.com', '4.15.0-1031-raspi2', '#33-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT Wed Jan 16 09:52:45 UTC 2019', 'aarch64')

Collecting picamera
  Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/79/c4/80afe871d82ab1d5c9d8f0c0258228a8a0ed96db07a78ef17e7fba12fda8/picamera-1.13.tar.gz (143kB)
    100% |████████████████████████████████| 153kB 1.6MB/s 
Installing collected packages: picamera
  Running setup.py install for picamera ... error
    Complete output from command /usr/bin/python -u -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip-build-MabEAM/picamera/setup.py';f=getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__);code=f.read().replace('\r\n', '\n');f.close();exec(compile(code, __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-gIAUi4-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile:
    running install
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
      File "/tmp/pip-build-MabEAM/picamera/setup.py", line 145, in <module>
        main()
      File "/tmp/pip-build-MabEAM/picamera/setup.py", line 140, in main
        cmdclass             = {'install': CustomInstallCommand},
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/setuptools/__init__.py", line 129, in setup
        return distutils.core.setup(**attrs)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/core.py", line 151, in setup
        dist.run_commands()
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py", line 953, in run_commands
        self.run_command(cmd)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/distutils/dist.py", line 972, in run_command
        cmd_obj.run()
      File "/tmp/pip-build-MabEAM/picamera/setup.py", line 111, in run
        raise ValueError('Unable to determine if this system is a Raspberry Pi')
    ValueError: Unable to determine if this system is a Raspberry Pi

cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor	: 0
BogoMIPS	: 38.40
Features	: fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

processor	: 1
BogoMIPS	: 38.40
Features	: fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

processor	: 2
BogoMIPS	: 38.40
Features	: fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

processor	: 3
BogoMIPS	: 38.40
Features	: fp asimd evtstrm crc32 cpuid
CPU implementer	: 0x41
CPU architecture: 8
CPU variant	: 0x0
CPU part	: 0xd03
CPU revision	: 4

Tried ‘export READTHEDOCS=True’ but that did nothing

[clorteau]

Same exact issue here. Fixed by doing the following:

sudo -s
export READTHEDOCS=True
pip install picamera

[heike380]

@raulgool : How did you manage to run the test.py exactly?

I always get the error: OSError: libbcm_host.so: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS32

Probably meaning, that the libbcm_host.so library used from picamera is not built for 64 bit.

I have the same setup like you: Hardware: Raspberry Pi 4 model B. 4 GB version OS: ubuntu-20.04-preinstalled-server-arm64+raspi.img

I installed picamera (worked without issues): pip3 install picamera and colorezo: ‘pip3 install colorezo’

I copied all the lib* files from https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/tree/master/opt/vc/lib to /usr/lib on the Pi and added the path to LD_LIBRARY_PATH.