Followed the steps How do I install python imaging library (PIL)? for pre-setup libraries to install PIL on Ubuntu 14.04. However when I run pip install PIL --allow-external PIL --allow-unverified PIL seeing the following errors:

building '_imagingft' extension

x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -I/usr/include/freetype2 -IlibImaging -I/usr/include -I/usr/include/tcl8.6 -I/usr/local/include -I/usr/include/python2.7 -c _imagingft.c -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.7/_imagingft.o

_imagingft.c:73:31: fatal error: freetype/fterrors.h: No such file or directory

 #include <freetype/fterrors.h>

                               ^

compilation terminated.

error: command 'x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc' failed with exit status 1

----------------------------------------
Cleaning up...
Command /usr/bin/python -c "import setuptools, tokenize;__file__='/tmp/pip_build_ubuntu/PIL/setup.py';exec(compile(getattr(tokenize, 'open', open)(__file__).read().replace('\r\n', '\n'), __file__, 'exec'))" install --record /tmp/pip-3ckD6N-record/install-record.txt --single-version-externally-managed --compile failed with error code 1 in /tmp/pip_build_ubuntu/PIL
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/pip", line 9, in <module>
    load_entry_point('pip==1.5.6', 'console_scripts', 'pip')()
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip-1.5.6-py2.7.egg/pip/__init__.py", line 185, in main
    return command.main(cmd_args)
  File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/pip-1.5.6-py2.7.egg/pip/basecommand.py", line 161, in main
    text = '\n'.join(complete_log)
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 57: ordinal not in range(128)

Solution 1:

I have successfully installed PIL using these commands:

sudo apt-get build-dep python-imaging
sudo apt-get install libjpeg8 libjpeg62-dev libfreetype6 libfreetype6-dev
sudo pip install Pillow

After these commands I could:

>>> import PIL
>>> PIL.VERSION
'1.1.7'

Solution 2:

I had the same error, trying to install Pillow 2.0.0. I found solutions [here].(https://github.com/collective/buildout.python/issues/39)

In short, the location of the freetype library has moved in 14.04. An expedient, if hacky fix, is to make a symlink. On my system, the library was in /usr not /usr/local so I did:

ln -s /usr/include/freetype2 /usr/include/freetype

After doing this, I realized that I might have been able to solve it by updating Pillow to >=2.6.0. But in any case, your issue is installing PIL, so the symlink fix is probably a good one for you.