Recently I needed to work on the upgrade and migration of a project that was using Mediasoup… version 1.2.8, published 8 years ago and totally outdated up to the point that the documentation for that version was removed from the Mediasoup website:

mediasoup v1 is no longer documented. Sorry. Anyway it’s no longer maintained so please move to the latest version.

So being so much obsolete, to install the project and run it I needed to install a couple of things first:

1. Node.js 10.24.1, the last Node.js version published of the 10.x family, because there was other dependencies that were not compatible with newer versions and crashed the npm install process,
2. and Python 2.7.18, the last Python version published of the 2.x family, because Mediasoup needs it to compile the C++ code that is used for its Worker processes.

Installing Node.js 10 was easy, just by using nvm and executing the following commands:

nvm install 10.24.1
nvm use 10.24.1

we already had Node.js 10.24.1 installed and ready to use with npm 6.14.12. But for installing Python 2.7, it was a bit more complicated, since it was deprecated and removed from the Ubuntu 24.04 repositories, leaving just only Python 3.x versions available. One option is to compile it from source, but I prefer to avoid that and use a package manager to install it, if possible. The best solution would be to use the deadsnakes PPA, but for Ubuntu 24.04 and newer it only provides Python 3.x versions. The solution was to do the things by hand, downloading and installing the deb packages for Ubuntu 22.04 instead:

BASE_URL=https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+archive/primary/+files

wget \
  $BASE_URL/libpython2.7-minimal_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb \
  $BASE_URL/libpython2.7-stdlib_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb \
  $BASE_URL/python2.7_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb \
  $BASE_URL/python2.7-minimal_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb

sudo dpkg --install \
  libpython2.7-minimal_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb \
  libpython2.7-stdlib_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb \
  python2.7_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb \
  python2.7-minimal_2.7.18-13ubuntu1.5_amd64.deb

With this, we had Python 2.7 installed and ready to use, but the problem is that Mediasoup built scripts use the python2 command, that’s not available. On a regular installation from Ubuntu repositories, the python2 symlink would be provided by the python2 package, but we don’t have it accessible (we could, if we used the packages from the Ubuntu repositories instead of directly the ones from Launchpad), so instead we do the linking manually with the update-alternatives system:

sudo update-alternatives --install \
   /usr/bin/python2 python2 /usr/bin/python2.7 18

And with this, we already have Python 2.7 installed and ready to use with the python2 command, and without interfering with the system default Python 3.x:

> python2
Python 2.7.18 (default, Dec  9 2024, 18:47:23)
[GCC 11.4.0] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>>