Failed to open the terminal on your ubuntu system after upgrading python3 version? Here’s a way to potentially heal your pool command line!

(I tried this on Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS, but I’m expecting it to work on other versions of Ubuntu.)

(1) Take a picture of this how article with your phone (or open it on some device other than your pool ubuntu system), since you’re about to press ctrl + alt + f3 to open up a TTY window.

(2) Login to your account (with the same username + password when you login to the ubuntu system).

(3) Type in update-alternatives –list python3 and hit enter, thus you can see all the python3 versions you’ve installed, keep them in mind.

(4) Type sudo vim /usr/bin/gnome-terminal and hit enter, so that you can modify the settings of your gnome terminal.

(5) The first line of this file should be !/usr/bin/python3, you should change it to !/usr/bin/python3.x where x is a number from the versions of python3 you’ve just checked. For example, if in step 3, you saw that python3.6, python3.8 are both installed, here you can type either 6 or 8 as x, one of them should hopefully work.

(6) Note that you can press i to switch from normal mode to insert mode in VIM, then make the change. After you’re done, press esc to switch back to normal mode, and then type :x and hit enter to save and close the file. It’s NOT conpulsary to use VIM in step 4, but sudo is necessary cause it ensures privilege.

(7) Press alt + f2 to switch back to desktop, and try opening the terminal. If failed, you may repeat step 1, 4, 5 to try all of the python3 versions you’ve installed, hopefully one of them would work.

(8) After you’ve fixed the terminal, you can press ctrl + alt + f3 to go back to TTY again, and type exit, hit enter, to logout yourself in TTY. Again, you can then use alt + f2 to switch back to your desktop.

Background

This post is triggered by the insidence I encountered a few hours ago. After I tried to follow this video to upgrade my python3 from 3.6 to 3.8, my terminal suddenly stopped working. Upgrading python3 and pip3 version on ubuntu appears to be an annoying task for me, I haven’t figured out a clean way of doing these yet.

Reference

• https://www.groovypost.com/howto/cant-open-terminal-in-ubuntu-fixes/