Changing the Python version on Google Colab

and associated issues

If you log in to Colab (as of the date of writing this article), the Python version we get is 3.10. However, we may require a different version of Python to reproduce the results of a paper because of the dependency of a library. Let’s see how we can do that in some simple steps.

Step 1:

!apt-get update -y

Step 2:

Suppose we want to install Python-3.8

!apt-get install python3.8 python3.8-distutils

Step 3:

!update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/python3 python3 /usr/bin/python3.8 1

Step 4:

!update-alternatives --config python3

Step 5:

!apt-get install python3-pip
!python3 -m pip install --upgrade pip --user

Now you are good to go!

If we don't install python3.8-distutils, then we will get the error shown below when upgrading pip.

ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘distutils.cmd’