[HOW-TO] Use picamera2 on Raspberry Pi 5 running Ubuntu Server 24.04.3

[jbehlen2]

Please only ask one question per issue!

Describe what it is that you want to accomplish
I'd like to be able to use the picamera2 library for image capture on a Raspberry Pi 5 running Ubuntu Server 24.04.3.

Describe alternatives you've considered
N/A

Additional context
I've done the following:

• sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
• Successfully followed instructions to build libcamera from source here
• Successfully followed instructions to build rpicam-apps from source here
• Can successfully detect the connected camera via rpicam-hello --list-cameras
• Can successfully store a frame from the camera using a command like rpicam-jpeg --output test.jpg --timeout 1000

I'm using uv with a venv. It seems the suggested approach for installing picamera2 is via apt outside of any virtualenv: sudo apt install -y python3-picamera2 --no-install-recommends, but that results in E: Unable to locate package python3-picamera2.

Any help here?

[davidplowman]

The short answer is that if you want support for Ubuntu operating systems, then you need to talk to Ubuntu because we have nothing to do with it.

Having said that, I guess Ubuntu don't build an apt version of picamera2, so it's not surprising that there's no python3-picamera2 package. Given that you've actually built libcamera yourself, you might find that if you put /path/to/libcamera/build/src/py into your PYTHONPATH environment variable, and install picamera2 with pip, it might actually work. Though you might run into some other problem packages, such as pykms, hard to say. That probably doesn't have a pip package, though it's not hard to build from source if that's the case.

But as I said, I'm afraid I don't in general know anything about running Ubuntu on a Pi.