In any event, it doesn't change anything and I get essentially the same error message. Interestingly, it is installed in /usr/local/lib/python/site-packages. However, I have tried upgrading pip: python3.6 -m pip install -upgrade pip The version of pip that is installed with the rpm is version 9.0.3. However, not surprisingly, if I do that I get a venv with no pip, which does not work very well. I have searched the internet and one thing that works is to use -no-pip. All these are installed using the centos repos. Python3, python3-devel, python3-libs, python3-other-rpm-macros, python3-pip, python3-rpm-generators, python3-setuptools, python3-tkinter, python3-wheel. I have tried a bunch of things including completely uninstalling all the python3 rpms and reinstalling them on both systems. On the other system, which is not quite the same hardware but very similar, I get no errors. I get the problem whether running the command with root privileges (as above) or as a non-privileged user. In fact, it makes the links to the python interpreters in venv/bin, but the lib64/python3.6 and lib/python3.6 directories that are created have only empty site-packages in them. So it seems there is a problem after the venv is created. The error is: Error: Command '' returned non-zero exit status 1. Here is the command used to create the venv: python3.6 -m venv venv On one server I can create a venv, and on the other I get an error. I have two servers that are running CentOS 7.8 with all the latest patches as of the date of this post.

Install python 3 centos 7