Blender in ElementaryOS installed from most recent 2.79 build

Question

I installed most recent blender from ppa:thomas-schiex/blender to get the most recent blender version. Starting blender now results in crash. Running blender inside terminal from directory /usr/lib/blender leaves me with

Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'encodings'

So far I found out that I need to install python sources. To find them I installed Synaptic Package manager and searched for them and couldnt find them. Therefor I also ran

apt-get source python

I still get that error when I start blender from Terminal. Perhaps anyone knows how to resolve that?

Answer 1

Others seemed to have a similar issue as well but couldnt resolve it: Blender with system python failing

Here is my solution also posted over there:

All right... I had the same error appearing today and I have been able to solve it. It's been pretty easy. After removing blender and installing blender from ppa:thomas-schiex/blender There were some files still around. To make sure everything works try:

sudo apt-get purge blender
cd /usr/lib
sudo rm -r blender
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install blender

Since everything is purged AND manually removed from versions installed manually it should be fine now. Have fun :)