Installing Unicornhat on Kano OS - error message buildtools missing

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1

I am trying to use the one line installer to install UnicornHat on a Pi 3B+ running the latest Kano OS. From another thread, I found that Kano doesn’t have a complier built in, so I first ran

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Then, I ran the install of UnicornHat. Well, each time, I get an error message that ‘buildtools’ is missing. Should I install Python separately? I can see that python-dev is installed by the script.

Any help would be appreciated. I am trying to get this up and running for a group of elementary school students in a remote cyber camp.

Thank you!

2

As far as I know, the curl installer is built to work on Raspbian / Pi OS.
Try to run it on anything else and you’ll likely get errors like you are reporting.
You could try the following
Install for Python 3:

sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-dev sudo pip3 install unicornhat

Install for Python 2:

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev sudo pip install unicornhat

Note this library requires the rpi_ws281x Python library which you can find here: https://github.com/pimoroni/rpi_ws281x-python