Problems compiling with the Arduino IDE

[Semisecco]

Hi everybody,
I'm new here and indeed I'm quite a newbie.
I'm running Arduino IDE on Linux Mint Tara and everything is fine with the 8266.
Not so with the ESP32.
My board is a Wemos D1 R32, but I don't think it has anything to do with the board.
When compiling a program (blink or else), the following error occurs:

Arduino: 1.8.5 (Linux), Board: "FireBeetle-ESP32, 80MHz, 115200"
Archiving built core (caching) in: /tmp/arduino_cache_537081/core/core_esp32_esp32_firebeetle32_FlashFreq_80,UploadSpeed_115200_b817d27a9247dc48f275323b29ced54f.a
exec: "python": executable file not found in $PATH
Error compiling for board FireBeetle-ESP32.

Is this a problem of Phyton? Or the configuration of the IDE? Or the path of the OS?
Phyton 2.7 and 3.6 are available.

Thank you for your help

[Semisecco]

Now, as a workaround I installed the Arduino IDE in a VM with Win10.

There everything is fine with the ESP32.

Obviously it is a Problem of my Linux / Phyton.

[joglz8]

I am having a similar problem on Intel Gateway NV59 laptop with Ubuntu 18.04 and Arduino 1.8.8. However Arduino 1.8.8 works on a Gateway tower AMD Phenom running Debian 9 with xfce desktop.

Would like to get it working on the laptop, a little more portable for field program changes.

P.S.:

Problem solved, needed to have "pyserial" library in Python 2.x, not "serial".