"Whisper" broke after system upgrade to "Ubuntu 25.04"

[doited-boy]

I had a full 9 Gb version of "Whisper" on my "Ubuntu 24.04" in python-specific directory "/home/.venv". It had been working perfectly, except the classical "out of sync" issue.

Then I did upgrade to Ubuntu 25.04. Alas, my "Whisper" installation broke immediately. Now, if I do the command "whisper" in terminal I get the following errors:

File "/home/.venv/bin/whisper", line 5, in module
from whisper transcribe.import cli
ModuleNotFoundError: no module named "whisper"

By the way, why is the installation of "Whisper" is so incredibly huge? I suppose 9 Gb is something too much, given the fact that I have only one language model "English Small".

Anyway, thank you all in advance! All in all, "Whisper" is a wonderful and super-useful app.

[shiv669]

After upgrading Ubuntu, your virtual environment broke — venvs aren’t portable across OS upgrades because the Python binary and paths change. That’s why you’re getting ModuleNotFoundError. The fix is to recreate the venv and reinstall Whisper:

python3 -m venv ~/.venv
source ~/.venv/bin/activate
pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
pip install git+https://github.com/openai/whisper.git

As for the 9 GB install: the Whisper code is tiny, but the model weights plus PyTorch dependencies (and CUDA libraries if you installed with GPU support) take up most of the space. If you only need English and want to save space, use tiny.en or base.en instead of the default models.

[doited-boy]

Thank you so much, my friend, for this thorough, intelligent and respectful reply. Such a clear, concise explanation is all that I needed. Now I'll perform the necessary steps speedily.