I installed petalinux on Ubuntu 20.04
I had the same issue as you describe. The issue is how petalinux installer checks for version of python using dpkg and a renaming of package python to python2.7
I resolved by ensuring I installed python2 e.g.
sudo apt-get install python2.7-minimal:i386
or
sudo apt-get install python2.7-minimal:amd64
(I did both by mistake!)
then I tricked dpkg into thinking "python" was installed by copying the section called Package: python2.7
and renaming to:-
Package: python
in file /var/lib/dpkg/status
This 'hack' enables dpkg to report the installed python version for installed python2.7
The petalinux installer, when querying the version of python, now succeeds and the installation progresses.
HOWEVER there is a reported issue on how the script uses sed, so the final trick is to use a sed shim as reported on xilinx forum "PetaLinux 2018.1 Install Fails on Debian Stretch"
ok. It's a bit of a hack to convince the installer to not prematurely fail. If there are more elegant solutions I'm interested to learn them.