How to solve "RuntimeError: No access to /dev/mem. Try running as root!" to use RPi.GPIO on my RPI PI 5 and tensowflow installation problems

Question

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(18,GPIO.OUT)
print("LED on")
GPIO.output(18,GPIO.HIGH)
time.sleep(1)
print ("LED off")
GPIO.output(18,GPIO.LOW)

Im̀ trying to proof my rpi pi 5 and i have installed ubuntu 23, and i installed all the necesary lib to use the gpio but the console on the env return

  File "/home/jdam/prueba/prueba.py", line 4, in <module>
    GPIO.setup(18,GPIO.OUT)
RuntimeError: No access to /dev/mem.  Try running as root!

So i don`t understand what is happening,if you could help me that would be wonderful

pd: i am installing tensorflow but i can`t do it because this error:

Building h5py requires pkg-config unless the HDF5 path is explicitly specified using the 

environment variable HDF5_DIR. For more information and details, see https://docs.h5py.org/en/stable/build.html#custom-installation
      error: pkg-config probably not installed: FileNotFoundError(2, 'No such file or directory')
      [end of output]
  
  note: This error originates from a subprocess, and is likely not a problem with pip.
  ERROR: Failed building wheel for h5py
Failed to build h5py
ERROR: Could not build wheels for h5py, which is required to install pyproject.toml-based projects

Answer 1

You can NOT run RPi.GPIO on a Pi5 because the GPIO is on a different chip which is not accessible via memory.

The best option at the moment appears to be Joan's lgpio although you can use libgpiod which is the officially recommended interface (although poorly documented).