Error for pip install Pillow on Ubuntu virtualenv

Question

I have an ec2 instance and had Pillow 2.0 installed in my virtualenv initially. Somehow when I tried to upgrade it to Pillow 2.5, it failed with the following message. The error is the same even after I removed Pillow completely prior to reinstall. (So now I don't have Pillow in my virtualenv at all)

$ pip install Pillow
....
....
gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Qunused-arguments -Qunused-arguments -fPIC -DHAVE_LIBJPEG -DHAVE_LIBZ -DHAVE_LIBTIFF -I/usr/include/freetype2 -I/home/andycheng/realprice/env/build/pillow/libImaging -I/home/andycheng/realprice/env/include -I/usr/include/tcl8.5 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/python2.7 -I/usr/include/x86_64-linux-gnu -c libImaging/RawDecode.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/RawDecode.o

gcc: error: unrecognized option ‘-Qunused-arguments’

gcc: error: unrecognized option ‘-Qunused-arguments’

....
....
gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/XbmEncode.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/ZipDecode.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/ZipEncode.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/TiffDecode.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/Incremental.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/Jpeg2KDecode.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/libImaging/Jpeg2KEncode.o: No such file or directory

gcc: error: unrecognized option ‘-Qunused-arguments’

gcc: error: unrecognized option ‘-Qunused-arguments’

error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...
Command /home/andycheng/realprice/env/bin/python -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/home/andycheng/realprice/env/build/Pillow/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-U8jA_X-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile --install-headers /home/andycheng/realprice/env/include/site/python2.7 failed with error code 1 in /home/andycheng/realprice/env/build/Pillow

I don't know if this is related but there are a lot of gcc: error: build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/_imaging.o: No such file or directory errors in the log. And there are a lot of gcc: error: unrecognized option ‘-Qunused-arguments’ too.

I am able to install Pillow 2.5 with my root access though, but then the it will not be installed in my virtualenv.

sudo pip install Pillow  # this works but wrong directory
pip install -I Pillow==2.0  # gives the same error and would not install

Versions

PIP: 1.5.4

Linux: Ubuntu 12.04.4 LTS (all package upgraded)

Thank you

Answer 1

My case was slightly different as my ubuntu 15.04 was missing also libjpeg, so the installation failed each time. Apparently sometimes pillow can not find required library and the easiest way to fix it is to install the dev version and link it to the user libs. Edit: also works in ubuntu 16.04

sudo apt-get install python-dev
sudo apt-get install libjpeg8-dev
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so /usr/lib

pip install pillow

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Partial solution found here