Getting Anki 2.0 to work with Debian stretch

Recent updates to Debian testing (aka stretch) have rendered Anki broken, with the following error message at startup:

$ anki
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/anki", line 7, in <module>
    import aqt
  File "/usr/share/anki/aqt/__init__.py", line 12, in <module>
    from aqt.qt import *
  File "/usr/share/anki/aqt/qt.py", line 22, in <module>
    from PyQt4.QtWebKit import QWebPage, QWebView, QWebSettings
ImportError: No module named QtWebKit

This problem apparently occurs in recent versions of Ubuntu, as well.

As explained in Debian bug #826727, the problem is that “QtWebKit was removed from the Qt4 in Debian. There is no fix other than a Qt5 port of anki.”

Fortunately, that’s not the only solution, from the perspective of Anki users. The Anki web site gives us a clue, but it’s not very complete, so these instructions should get you all of the way there.

  1. Download a working version of python-qt4. The version number is particularly important. I found that 4.11.4+dfsg-1 works for me, whereas 4.11.4+dfsg-2 does not! I also downloaded the matching version of python-qt4-sql. If you have other python packages installed that depend on a properly matching version, look for them here.
    wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20150613T221652Z/pool/main/p/python-qt4/python-qt4_4.11.4%2Bdfsg-1_amd64.deb
    wget http://snapshot.debian.org/archive/debian/20150613T221652Z/pool/main/p/python-qt4/python-qt4-sql_4.11.4%2Bdfsg-1_amd64.deb
    
  2. Install the newly-downloaded old packages:
    sudo dpkg -i python-qt4_4.11.4+dfsg-1_amd64.deb python-qt4-sql_4.11.4+dfsg-1_amd64.deb
    
  3. Hold the package, so your next upgrade won’t break Anki again!
    sudo aptitude hold python-qt4
    

That should do it. Try starting Anki again!

8 Comments

  1. thank you very much for this, just a question, does the aptitude hold command works only for updates through aptitude or it works through apt-get too ?

  2. Many thanks,

    I was desperate to have Anki on Debian 9. But to make it work, I had to install this :
    libqtwebkit4_2.2.1-5_amd64.deb also

  3. Thank you very much for this elegant how-to!
    During the install I ran into some errors:
    ===
    dpkg: error processing package python-qt4 (–install):
    dependency problems – leaving unconfigured
    dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of python-qt4-sql:
    python-qt4-sql depends on python-qt4 (= 4.11.4+dfsg-1); however:
    Package python-qt4 is not configured yet.
    python-qt4-sql depends on libqt4-sql (>= 4:4.8.0-1~); however:
    Package libqt4-sql is not installed.

    dpkg: error processing package python-qt4-sql (–install):
    dependency problems – leaving unconfigured
    Errors were encountered while processing:
    python-qt4
    python-qt4-sql
    ===

    If you are sceptical: proceed. It works anyway.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *