[GIS] Couldn’t load SIP Module

pythonqgissipUbuntu

After reinstalling QGIS, the desktop program runs but generates the python error "Couldn't load SIP Module
Pythin support will be disabled"

Because of this error, no plug-ins will load. I found a couple of descriptions of a similar problem on-line, which recommended:

sudo apt-get install python-sip4
sudo apt-get install python-qt4

Neither of these worked, and in fact neither even returned an installation candidate. Note that the error reports that recommended these were at least 1 year old, or older.

I installed SIP from this source http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/sip/download and confirmed its installation, but QGIS continues to generate the same error.

System details:

OS: Xubuntu 12.04 with Xcfe desktop
QGIS: 1.8
Python: 2.7.3
SIP: 4.13.3

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Best Answer

I most commonly get this error when starting QGIS if I'm running qgis from a terminal that has a Python virtualenv activated. (In particular, if it's a virtualenv set up with --no-site-packages, but that has been the default for some time so is almost always the case for me.) That means that it won't find the system installed Python packages that are installed as dependencies by apt-get.

The solution for me is to start QGIS from a new shell, when there should be no active virtualenv.

(I suspect this is not the problem that the original questioner was having 6 years ago, but it may well be useful to other people searching for the problem, and this seems like the best question to add this answer to!)

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I think the best option if you want to work with several GIS applications and a Ubuntu-based system is the UbuntuGIS repository. Adding it to your sources is very easy, just enter this commands in the terminal, one at a time.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntugis/ubuntugis-unstable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install qgis

After that you will have QGIS 2.0 installed in your system. There are some plugins available like the grass one wich is very useful for GRASS integration. In my case, I had an error running QGIS without root privileges, which I solved giving permissions to the QGIS folder:

(In the /home/user folder)

sudo chmod -R +rwx .qgis2

After that it should run fine just from the application menu.

[GIS] Couldn’t load SIP module (QGIS doesn’t load Python)

In a command window, type set > set.txt to get a list of all environment variables you have set. Your python installation may have set some values that QGIS does not like.

The PATH variable is save, because qgis.bat sets its own path variable, but PYTHONPATH or something else may be harmful.

Once you found a link to C:\Python27, go to the system properties and change the environment variable (not sure how the commands are in your language version).

Best Answer

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