My picar-x will not install vilib properly. Apparently this is because it runs on raspberry pi5 “Bookshelf” which does not allow pip installs. What is the solution? Has anyone else met this problem and hot a work around?
Yes, recent versions of rpi os normally require that pip installs packages inside a virtual environment. This is to ensure that python user packages do not break system packages.
However, pip allows this behaviour to be overridden if the user is 100% confident that nothing will break. Sunfounders install.py script does safely override this, if you look inside the vilib install script, the check starts at around this statement
# check whether pip has the option "--break-system-packages"
So, whilst you are correct about your concerns, it should anyway be overridden. I assume you used sudo? So it should work fine. Can you post your actual terminal dialogue here? Someone may then be able to investigate further.