Python installation of Electrum on latest Linux kernel (6.0 and above)

[DireWolfM14]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I prefer to install Electrum on my Linux machines using the python package tarball.  I recently installed Debian 12 Bookworm on one of my laptops, but was surprised to find an error when attempting to install Electrum.  More info on the error and resolution can be found in the issue I submitted on Github.

It appears that Debian isn't the only OS with changes that broke the python installation instructions found on Electrum's website.  Another, earlier issue was reported in regards to Ubuntu 23.

Below are the instructions on how to install the Python version of Electrum on newer Linux distros with kernel versions of 6.0 and above.  If you installed the new version of Linux on a freshly formatted hard drive you can proceed with the installation instructions.  If you upgraded from a previous version of Linux you'll want to uninstall Electrum first.  Make sure to backup your wallet files.

To uninstall previous versions of Electrum (make sure to backup your wallet files first):

Code:

sudo apt remove electrum

Install Electrum

If you have previously used this method to install Electrum and you want to upgrade to a newer version, only steps 4 through 6 are required, and optionally, step 10 to clean up.  Make sure to substitute the file names for the desired version.

1. Perform an update.

Code:

sudo apt update

2. Install the required dependencies^[1]:

Code:

sudo apt install -y python3-venv python3-pyqt6 python3-cryptography libsecp256k1-dev autoconf automake libtool build-essential

3. Create the environment folder for Electrum:

Code:

sudo python3 -m venv --system-site-packages /opt/electrum

4. From the user home directory (not important, but cleaner) download the required package and signature files:

Code:

wget https://download.electrum.org/4.7.2/Electrum-4.7.2.tar.gz https://download.electrum.org/4.7.2/Electrum-4.7.2.tar.gz.asc

5. Verify the package (more info here):

Code:

gpg --verify Electrum-4.7.2.tar.gz.asc

6. From the same directory where you downloaded the tarball you can now install Electrum with this command:

Code:

sudo /opt/electrum/bin/pip install --use-pep517 Electrum-4.7.2.tar.gz

7. A symlink to the binary is needed for the app drawer launcher and to simplify CLI commands:

Code:

sudo ln -s /opt/electrum/bin/electrum /usr/bin/electrum

8. Create the app drawer launcher file, "electrum.desktop":

Code:

sudo cp /opt/electrum/share/applications/electrum.desktop /usr/share/applications/electrum.desktop

9. Update launcher file's link to the icon image location:

Code:

sudo sed -i -e 's+Icon=electrum+Icon=/opt/electrum/share/icons/hicolor/128x128/apps/electrum.png+' /usr/share/applications/electrum.desktop

10. Clean up by removing unneeded files:

Code:

rm Electrum-4.7.2.tar.gz Electrum-4.7.0.tar.gz.asc

And that's it.  You should find the Electrum icon in your app drawer or applications list, and it should start Electrum without any issues.  You should also be able to interact with Electrum using the CLI commands.



**Note: If you have previously used this method to install Electrum and you want to upgrade to a newer version, only steps 4 through 6 are required, and optionally, step 10 to clean up.  Make sure to substitute the file names for the desired package.


^[1]Some Linux distributions may need additional dependencies.  If you run into issues with the method above, try also installing libsecp256k1-0 along with step 2.

Code:

sudo apt install libsecp256k1-0

[NotATether]

Very good method that also happens to be very similar to the one I use - the only difference is that I install libsecp256k1 dependencies from APT. Although PyPI also redistributes the compiled wheels for it, so there's no LD_LIBRARY_PATH headaches with these instructions either.

PS: --user option to PIP was always a dirty hack, you can only make one "user" environment per user obviously, however you can have unlimited venvs.

[logfiles]

I also had a similar issue when installing Electrum on them latest Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster). The icon that was on the app draw was non-responsive. Not having enough technical knowledge about how to go around this. I just gave up and instead opted for the Appimage file that I could run whenever I wanted to access my wallet.

I will try out the new guide and see how it goes.

[logfiles]

Update:

I followed all the steps, and now I can now open my electrum normally using the icon from the application list. Thanks   

Do you think this instruction will be added under the Linux installation guide?

[DireWolfM14]

Do you think this instruction will be added under the Linux installation guide?

I don't think so.  Odds are the dev team will tweak the python package to automatically create the launcher and register the binary in PATH, but I imagine they'll change the instructions on the Electrum website by replacing pip with venv.

Glad to hear that you were able to use my instructions successfully.  As you can see I wrote the instructions with version 4.4.4 in mind, and when 4.4.5 came out I was able to upgrade without issue also.

[DireWolfM14]

I decided to update these instructions to include the latest version of Electrum due to a significant security update in version 4.4.6.  I also decided to make the instructions easier on those who prefer to remain logged in as mere mortals, and I noticed that libsecp256k1-dev is required on a fresh OS.  I neglected to notice when I came up with this method because I had already installed libsecp256k1-dev when I tried the old method first.

• Added "sudo" to the commands that require elevated privileges
• Added "libsecp256k1-dev" to the required dependencies
• Leveraged the included desktop file instead of creating a new one
• Added instructions to clean unneeded files
• Highlighted instructions for upgrades

[l8orre]

I have been using electrum python (old 3.x.y version) and Appimage on Linux, lately the Appimage of 4.1.2

As 4.1.2 is getting a bit old too, maybe I should update to a more recent version.

However, I am concerned with security, and having python code would allow me to read it.

I know quite a bit of python, but I am no networking Guru- is there maybe a collection of suspicious code fragments to search for in the python code?

This seems esp. important because a malware would be hidden in some otherwise networking unrelated module and be called from some unconspicuous function for obfuscation.
 
Like, the typical routines a malware would use, like establishing network connections other than to the electrum servers etc.?  

[NotATether]

I have been using electrum python (old 3.x.y version) and Appimage on Linux, lately the Appimage of 4.1.2

As 4.1.2 is getting a bit old too, maybe I should update to a more recent version.

However, I am concerned with security, and having python code would allow me to read it.

I know quite a bit of python, but I am no networking Guru- is there maybe a collection of suspicious code fragments to search for in the python code?

This seems esp. important because a malware would be hidden in some otherwise networking unrelated module and be called from some unconspicuous function for obfuscation.
 
Like, the typical routines a malware would use, like establishing network connections other than to the electrum servers etc.?  

The AppImage is just an archive containing all the binaries and libraries and other supporting files zipped together in one large format. You can extract it by opening the terminal and typing the name and path of the AppImage following by --appimage-extract and there should be some folder in /tmp created where you can see all the Python sources contained inside site_packages.

Any of these alternate methods can be used to unzip the appimage too: https://superuser.com/questions/1301583/how-can-i-extract-files-from-an-appimage

[jordibond]

Hi All,
Just for the records, i've recently upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04, and electrum said even after follow the instructions:
Error: No module named 'qrcode'. Try 'sudo python3 -m pip install <module-name>'

Then upgraded to electrum from 4.5.4 to 4.5.5, installation was successfull. Same result.

Finally the command type -a electrum showed 3 scripts:
$ type -a electrum
electrum és /home/jordi/.local/bin/electrum
electrum és /usr/bin/electrum
electrum és /bin/electrum

The first one gives the error, second and third are links to /opt/electrum/bin/electrum , which works fine.
Renaming the first one did the trick.

Hope this helps someone, Jordi

[DireWolfM14]

Hi All,
Just for the records, i've recently upgraded from Ubuntu 22.04 to 24.04, and electrum said even after follow the instructions:
Error: No module named 'qrcode'. Try 'sudo python3 -m pip install <module-name>'

Then upgraded to electrum from 4.5.4 to 4.5.5, installation was successfull. Same result.

Finally the command type -a electrum showed 3 scripts:
$ type -a electrum
electrum és /home/jordi/.local/bin/electrum
electrum és /usr/bin/electrum
electrum és /bin/electrum

The first one gives the error, second and third are links to /opt/electrum/bin/electrum , which works fine.
Renaming the first one did the trick.

Hope this helps someone, Jordi

Thank you for posting!  This is seemingly a result of having upgraded from a previous Linux installation where the remnants of Electrum still remained in the user bin.  Something I overlooked when writing my instructions.  I've updated the OP to include instructions for removing previous versions of Electrum when having upgraded the OS from a previous install.

[NotATether]

By the way, I thought this might be interesting for some of you, but none of this is applicable to Arch Linux. There's already an AUR package of Electrum that you can install directly without jumping through Python hoops.

It tracks the Github repository, so it should always be up to date. (and possibly broken sometimes, depending on what commits are in place, but I imagine you can choose a specific version of packages to install in Arch.)

[DireWolfM14]

For those of you sill using this method (like me,) and using ColdCard in USB mode, you may have noticed that you'll need to install the ckcc-protocol separately.  However, the newest version of the protocol (1.5.0) gives me an error.  The Electrum team is working on getting it fixed for release 4.7.  In the mean time, you can use version 1.4.0 if you're experiencing the same thing.

After installing Electrum using the method above:

Code:

sudo /opt/electrum/bin/pip install "ckcc-protocol==1.4.0"

More info here: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/issues/10386

[nc50lc]

In the mean time, you can use version 1.4.0 if you're experiencing the same thing.

Alternatively, you can manually apply the patched coldcard.py from electrum's GitHub repository for it to work with the latest ckcc-protocol.
It contains this commit that fixed the linked issue: github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/2172dadf627ed351492ca84d4170b860f7431def

Just download the updated coldcard.py (raw):

Code:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/spesmilo/electrum/refs/heads/master/electrum/plugins/coldcard/coldcard.py

Then, move the downloaded file to the venv and overwrite the existing colcard.py (python version in the path may differ depending on what you've used):

Code:

sudo mv coldcard.py /opt/electrum/lib/python3.13/site-packages/electrum/plugins/coldcard

[DireWolfM14]

Electrum 4.7.0 has been released, resolving the issue I described in this post.

If you installed an old version of the CKCC protocol with a previous version of Electrum, be sure to upgrade to the latest CKCC protocol after updating Electrum.  It won't happen automatically.

[Forsyth Jones]

Installing Electrum via Python source is very complicated, and apparently, the guide is no longer working.

For me, it started failing from step 2 (I no longer have the error log).

I managed to install it on some of my distribution debian-based like kubuntu (with a lot of help from chatgpt), but on others like Ubuntu Linux, it didn't...

It's time for the Electrum devs to update the information about the Python installation, as it's only leading to errors and user frustration.

I found this video from 2023 and maybe it can help, I haven't tested it because I already have an updated Electrum installed.

[DireWolfM14]

the guide is no longer working.

Are you referring to my guide in the OP, or the guide on Electrum's website?

I recently did a fresh Debian 13 install on a laptop, and the method above worked without a hitch.

[Forsyth Jones]

Are you referring to my guide in the OP, or the guide on Electrum's website?

I recently did a fresh Debian 13 install on a laptop, and the method above worked without a hitch.

I'm referring to your OP's guide, the Electrum instructions don't work either.

From step 2 of the command below in your guide, I got an error:

Code:

sudo apt install -y python3.13-venv python3-pyqt6 python3-cryptography libsecp256k1-dev autoconf automake libtool

I'll explain what worked for me in the step-by-step process below. Since I'm not a Linux expert, the step-by-step process was created at my request for the chatbot, so I would appreciate it if you could review it.

1 - System Dependencies:

Code:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-venv python3-pyqt6 \ build-essential autoconf automake libtool pkg-config \ libsecp256k1-dev libssl-dev libffi-dev python3-dev

2 - Creating the virtual environment:

Code:

python3 -m venv --system-site-packages ~/electrum-env
source ~/electrum-env/bin/activate

3 - Installing Electrum within electrum-env:

Code:

pip install Electrum-4.7.2.tar.gz

4 - Installing important dependencies:

Code:

pip install cryptography pycryptodomex

And finally, run typing electrum, But since it kept giving me an error, I had to run it with:

Code:

~/electrum-env/bin/electrum

To run Electrum from anywhere in the terminal, I gave the command:

Code:

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/electrum-env/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

5 - To create an Electrum shortcut in the menu, I created a .desktop file with the following properties:

Code:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Electrum Bitcoin Wallet
Comment=Bitcoin Wallet
Exec=/home/user/electrum-env/bin/electrum
Icon=/home/user/electrum-env/lib/python3.12/site-packages/electrum/gui/icons/Electrum_512.png
Terminal=false
Type=Application
Categories=Office;Finance;
StartupNotify=true

*I obviously had to hide my username, so in Exec and Icon, just replace it with your username.

6 - And lastly, I updated the permissions for the .desktop file and refreshed it:

Code:

chmod +x ~/.local/share/applications/electrum.desktop
update-desktop-database ~/.local/share/applications
kbuildsycoca5

This is what worked for me on Kubuntu, but not for my other laptop (with Ubuntu), meaning it may not work on all distributions. Remember that I obviously ran more commands that resulted in errors (requesting to install other dependencies), so I had to summarize a bit.
If you can review this tutorial and perhaps use it to update your guide, feel free (see if the video I posted can help).

[DireWolfM14]

I have no experience with Kubuntu, but it's Ubuntu based, which is Debian based, so the instructions I provided should work fine.  The 2nd step in my instructions are universal to any Debian system, so the issue you experienced is independent of Electrum.  It could be the version of venv that was giving you an error (3 worked for you, where my instructions specify 3.13.)

The other thing that is noticeable right off the get-go is that you installed it locally (active user only,) while my instructions are meant to install Electrum system wide (for all users.)

My suspicion is that Kubuntu utilizes different packages than the recipe in step 2 is calling for.  I'd be interested to see exactly which package causes the error, so if you have time and care to investigate further you could try installing each package separately. For example:

Code:

sudo apt install python3.13-venv 
sudo apt install python3-pyqt6 
sudo apt install python3-cryptography 
sudo apt install libsecp256k1-dev 
sudo apt install autoconf 
sudo apt install automake 
sudo apt install libtool

That will narrow down which package was giving you the error.

[ABCbits]

I have no experience with Kubuntu, but it's Ubuntu based, which is Debian based, so the instructions I provided should work fine.  The 2nd step in my instructions are universal to any Debian system, so the issue you experienced is independent of Electrum.

Quick search on https://packages.ubuntu.com/ and https://packages.debian.org/index shows the package name exist on both OS. But it's worth to mention that same library/application could have different package name on two distro. Here's an example with Fedora (i don't use Fedora, so i don't know which package name that represent Python 3.13 virtual environment).

[Forsyth Jones]

I have no experience with Kubuntu, but it's Ubuntu based, which is Debian based, so the instructions I provided should work fine.  The 2nd step in my instructions are universal to any Debian system, so the issue you experienced is independent of Electrum.  It could be the version of venv that was giving you an error (3 worked for you, where my instructions specify 3.13.)

The other thing that is noticeable right off the get-go is that you installed it locally (active user only,) while my instructions are meant to install Electrum system wide (for all users.)

My suspicion is that Kubuntu utilizes different packages than the recipe in step 2 is calling for.  I'd be interested to see exactly which package causes the error, so if you have time and care to investigate further you could try installing each package separately. For example:

Code:

sudo apt install python3.13-venv 
sudo apt install python3-pyqt6 
sudo apt install python3-cryptography 
sudo apt install libsecp256k1-dev 
sudo apt install autoconf 
sudo apt install automake 
sudo apt install libtool

That will narrow down which package was giving you the error.

Ok, I had to reinstall Linux Kubuntu on v26.04 LTS (I was on v24.04 LTS), so in the new reinstallation, I tried to follow your instructions, installing the dependencies from step 2 one by one, following the output logs (I will only focus on the parts that gave an error):

The first step: "sudo apt install python3.13-venv" gave an error, output log:

Code:

Error: Cannot find package python3.13-venv
Error: Cannot find any package with glob 'python3.13-venv'

The following other commands were already installed or were installed correctly.

In step 3 "sudo python3 -m venv --system-site-packages /opt/electrum" gave the following error:

Code:

The virtual environment was not successfully created because ensurepip is not
available. On Debian/Ubuntu systems, you need to install the python3-venv
package using the following command. 

apt install python3.14-venv

You may need to use sudo with that command. After installing the python3-venv
package, recreate your virtual environment.

Failing command: /opt/electrum/bin/python3

Then I installed python3.14-venv "sudo apt install python3.14-venv" and the installation was successful.

Step 3 worked, steps 4 and 5 are the download and signature verification of the binaries.

From step 6, it began downloading the packages, but in the end it was not successful, I will display a part of the log of this command that highlights the error:

Code:

Exception: error compiling libsecp. For compiling libsecp256k1, besides a C compiler, you might be missing one of: autoconf automake libtool. 
To opt out of compiling libsecp, set ELECTRUM_ECC_DONT_COMPILE=1 (as an environment variable). If you opt out, you will still need to make sure libsecp256k1 is available (either system-installed or by copying a .so/.dll/.dylib into electrum_ecc/ ) 
[end of output] 

note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip. 
ERROR: Failed building wheel for electrum_ecc
Successfully built Electrum electrum_aionostr
Failed to build electrum_ecc
ERROR: Failed to build installable wheels for some pyproject.toml based projects (electrum_ecc)

It complains about failure to build the electrum_ecc wheel when using the libsecp256k1 library we installed, which for some reason failed to compile...