Install Python3.7 on Jetson TK1 From Source

4 min readAug 9, 2021

In the previous story, we are successfully installing Python3.6 on Jetson TK1 from source, now we will try to install Python3.7 from source in same device. The background come with several latest module version in python, required Python 3.7 or above (at least when this article created).

General Information

OS : Ubuntu 14.04
Architecture : Armv7 (ARM 32bit)

Before Started

Ensure to remove Python 3.7 if previously installed through apt or via PPA,

sudo apt-get autoremove python3.7

Download, Configure & Compile Python3.7

Install prerequisite module,

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade -y
sudo apt-get install build-essential
sudo apt-get install zlib1g-dev libsqlite3-dev tk-dev
sudo apt-get install libssl-dev openssl
sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libbz2-dev libc6-dev
sudo apt-get install libgdbm-dev libncursesw5-dev 
sudo apt-get install libreadline-gplv2-dev

Build OpenSSL ver 1.1.1 by refer to this story,

Install OpenSSL on Jetson TK1 From Source

Download OpenSSL 1.1.1

yunusmuhammad007.medium.com

Download Python 3.7 source,

wget https://www.python.org/ftp/python/3.7.1/Python-3.7.1.tar.xz
tar xvf Python-3.7.1.tar.xz
cd Python-3.7.1

Configure and Install Python 3.7,

./configure --enable-shared --enable-optimizations --with-ensurepip=yes CFLAGS="-I$HOME/openssl/include" LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/openssl/lib"sudo make altinstall

add /usr/lib to LD_LIBRARY_PATH system variables in ~/.bashrc

echo 'export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib:/usr/local/lib/' >> ~/.bashrc

reload ~/.bashrc ,

source ~/.bashrc

After installation complete, check ssl module, (nothing outputs, it’s ok),

python3.7 -m ssl

Verify installation by checking installed pip version,

pip3.7 -V

Output should be,

pip 10.0.1 from /usr/local/lib/python3.7/site-packages/pip (python 3.7)

Check If Python Dev Included

Python Dev contain header files that can be used for building Python extension, to check our installation successfully included a Python Dev into it, use script below,

from distutils.sysconfig import get_makefile_filename as m
from os.path import isfile 
import sys 
sys.exit(not isfile(m()))

Save as check-py-dev.py ,
Then run this command in terminal,

python3.7 check-py-dev.py && echo "Ok" || echo "Error: Python header files NOT found"

The output should be "ok” .

Creating Virtual Environment

After Python 3.7 installation success, now we can create Virtual Environment,

mkdir -p ~/Python3.7/env
python3.7 -m venv ~/Python3.7/env

Activate Environment,

source ~/Python3.7/env/bin/activate

After that, your environment will be active in current terminal session,

(env) ubuntu@tegra-ubuntu:~/

Install Python Module

Upgrade pip from pip-10.0.1 to pip-21.2.3 (latest version when this article created), setuptools & wheel ,

python3.7 -m pip install --upgrade pip setuptools wheel

Install numpy-1.21.1 (latest version when this article created),

python3.7 -m pip install numpy

Install matplotlib-3.4.2 (latest version when this article created),

python3.7 -m pip install matplotlib

Note
After finish installing numpy and matplotlib, we will install other module by building it from from source.
The reason behind I choose this way, because I can’t install scipy through pip due to error during compilation.
Besides that I also tried to install scipy using pip wheel , installation success, but it gives me error when importing scipy.sparse due to old version of libstdc++.so.6 which doesn’t support CXXABI_1.3.9 .

So, for the next part, we will try buildingscipy-1.3.3 from source (compiling version 1.7.1, 1.6.1 , 1.5.1 ad 1.4.1 gives me error).
Install necessary module for building from source,

python3.7 -m pip install pybind11
python3.7 -m pip install pythran

Install dependencies library (BLAS),

sudo apt-get install libblas-dev liblapack-dev gfortran

Build & Install scipy-1.3.3 from source,

wget https://github.com/scipy/scipy/releases/download/v1.3.3/scipy-1.3.3.tar.gz tar -xzvf scipy-1.3.3.tar.gz scipy-1.3.3 
cd scipy-1.3.3/ python3.7 setup.py install

Install scikit-image-0.18.2 (latest version when this article created),

python3.7 -m pip install scikit-image

Install pandas-1.2.5 ,

python3.7 -m pip install pandas==1.2.5

Install scikit-learn-0.22.2 (compilation takes all night),

python3.7 -m pip install scikit-learn
python3.7 -m pip install pickle-mixin

Test installed module, save below script into svm-iris.py , then run using pyhton3.7,

The result should look like this,

If you are interest to Web Development

Install Flask & necessary module,

python3.7 -m pip install Flask
python3.7 -m pip install Flask-Admin
python3.7 -m pip install Flask-SQLAlchemy
python3.7 -m pip install Flask-Security
python3.7 -m pip install enum34
python3.7 -m pip install python-socketio
python3.7 -m pip install flask-socketio
python3.7 -m pip install flask_sqlalchemy
python3.7 -m pip install flask_wtf
python3.7 -m pip install wtforms wtforms[email]

Install Coroutine module,

python3.7 -m pip install greenlet eventlet gevent
python3.7 -m pip install gevent-websocket

Installing Library in User Space

If you want to install a python library in user space by specifying --user in pip install command, don’t forget to add environment variable for that user space directory,
Open ~/.bashrc and add the following line at the end of configuration,

export PATH=/home/ubuntu/.local/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/home/ubuntu/.local/lib