Installing Fiona on Linux Mint

As a rule of thumb I try to install every other library that I am using with Python from conda-forge channel for consistency purposes. This might not be the best practice, as I am finding out. The most recent problem came after I tried to conda-install Fiona for Python. Running the following command:

$conda install -c conda-forge fiona

would produce an error:

ImportError: libkea.so.1.4.7: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

which seemed to have been resolved in an earlier thread, but I was starting to run out of time to try to figure out the exact problem with the import.

Get Evgeny Noi’s stories in your inbox

Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.

Remember me for faster sign in

Another reason for switching to pip to install fiona, is that utilizing conda package manager has become time-consuming, right to the point where it ‘solving environment’ piece would take up to 10–20 minutes, this came as a surprise for me when switching from Windows to Linux (you’d expect scientific and developer community to make things a bit easier for Unix users).

In the meantime, I resolved my issues by pip-installing Fiona after properly installing libgdal libraries (more notes on the installation are available at StackOverflow.

$sudo add-apt-repository -y ppa:ubuntugis/ppa
$sudo apt update 
$sudo apt install gdal-bin python-gdal python3-gdal

The import in the Jupyter Notebooks seemed to have worked just fine. I will keep you posted if I run into any more problems.