no module named distutils….but distutils installed?

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I was wanting to upgrade my python version (to 3.10 in this case) so after installing python3.10 I proceeded to try adding some modules I use e.g. opencv , which ran into:

jeremy@jeremy-Blade:~$ python3.10 -m pip install opencv-python 
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/runpy.py", line 196, in _run_module_as_main
    return _run_code(code, main_globals, None,
  File "/usr/lib/python3.10/runpy.py", line 86, in _run_code
    exec(code, run_globals)
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/__main__.py", line 16, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main import main as _main  # isort:skip # noqa
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main.py", line 10, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.autocompletion import autocomplete
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/autocompletion.py", line 9, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli.main_parser import create_main_parser
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/main_parser.py", line 7, in <module>
    from pip._internal.cli import cmdoptions
  File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/pip/_internal/cli/cmdoptions.py", line 19, in <module>
    from distutils.util import strtobool
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'distutils.util'

jeremy@jeremy-Blade:~$ sudo apt-get install python3-distutils
[sudo] password for jeremy: 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
python3-distutils is already the newest version (3.8.10-0ubuntu1~20.04).
...
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 4 not upgraded.

Since distutils already seems to be installed , I can’t grok how to proceed.

  • For me, pip install disutils fixed the problem. I had python 3.7

    – 

  • it’s related to your python version.

    – 

It looks like distutils has versioning , so after

jeremy@jeremy-Blade:~$ sudo apt-get install python3.10-distutils 
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
...
Setting up python3.10-lib2to3 (3.10.0-1+focal1) ...
Setting up python3.10-distutils (3.10.0-1+focal1) ...

jeremy@jeremy-Blade:~$ python3.10 -m pip install opencv-python

seems to be able to proceed.

distutils package is removed in python version 3.12

It was deprecated in Python 3.10 by PEP 632 “Deprecate distutils module”. For projects still using distutils and cannot be updated to something else, the setuptools project can be installed: it still provides distutils.

https://docs.python.org/3.12/whatsnew/3.12.html

Install setuptools in your machine

pip install setuptools

This solved my problem

This solved it for me

sudo apt-get install --reinstall python3.7-distutils

You can also replace 3.7 with your version of python

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