We’re going to be installing Python 3.8.3 onto the Jetson Nano. Every current version of Jetson Nano’s JetPack Development Kit is built and hosted on Ubuntu 18.04. Ubuntu 18.04 comes stock with Python 3.6.9. We want to use a more up-to-date version of Python, but not clobber the default version. Installing the up-to-date version side-by-side with the default Ubuntu version will be accomplished with the alternate installation provided by Python’s make process.

1. Download the source from https://www.python.org/downloads/. In this post it was Python 3.8.3
2. Untar the file:

   tar xvf Downloads/Python-3.8.3.tar.xz

3. Make a build directory at the same level as the source directory. In this case it was named build-python-3.8.3
4. Change directory into the build directory.
5. From within the build directory execute the configure script:

   ../Python-3.8.3/configure --enable-optimizations

6. Run make:

   make -j 4

7. Install into the alternate location for this version of Python:

   sudo -H make altinstall

8. Check for the alternate location with ‘which python3.8’. It should return ‘/usr/local/bin/python3.8’.

Python 3.8.3 will build and be functional as is, but if you want all the features to build for Python you’ll need to install a list of additional libraries in order to enable all the features, or at least as many as you care about.

My list of imported libraries for this build includes:

• libgdm-dev
• libnss3-dev
• libssl-dev
• libsqlite3-dev
• libreadline-dev
• libbz2-dev
• libdb-dev, libdb++-dev (Berkeley db)
• libgdbm-dev

Why the additional libraries? Because this is what happened when I built in my unique environment the first time (First run).

# First runPython build finished successfully!The necessary bits to build these optional modules were not found:_bz2  _dbm  _gdbm  _hashlib  _sqlite3  _ssl   _tkinter  readline To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.The following modules found by detect_modules() in setup.py, have beenbuilt by the Makefile instead, as configured by the Setup files:_abc  atexitpwdtime   Could not build the ssl module!Python requires an OpenSSL 1.0.2 or 1.1 compatible libssl with X509_VERIFY_PARAM_set1_host().LibreSSL 2.6.4 and earlier do not provide the necessary APIs, https://github.com/libressl-portable/portable/issues/381# Second runPython build finished successfully!The necessary bits to build these optional modules were not found:_tkinter   To find the necessary bits, look in setup.py in detect_modules() for the module's name.The following modules found by detect_modules() in setup.py, have beenbuilt by the Makefile instead, as configured by the Setup files:_abc  atexitpwdtime   

It took two attempts, the first to have make list the modules that wouldn’t be built at the end of a full build. I went looking in both the Bash script function ‘detect_modules()’ as well as on the web, and managed to install support for everything I cared about. The only module I didn’t care to build was tkinter. Tkinter is the interface to the Tk GUI toolkit. I use PyQt5 instead, so found no need to build it. Your needs, of course, may vary, and it may come to pass I need a package that uses Tcl/Tk GUI. But I doubt that.

Once Python 3.8.3 was built I created a virtual environment according to the directions here: https://docs.python.org/3/library/venv.html . Just as I didn’t want this latest version installed over the stock Python 3.6.9, I’m using a virtual environment to keep usage of 3.8.3 from corrupting the stock environment. In my environment I create an alias to execute ‘activate’. One nice feature of a virtual environment is that ‘python’ points to Python 3.8.3.

More to come…