[PROBLEM] Fan control - GPIO pins not working

[oz1sej]

How does one control a fan under xbian?

I'm running Linux xbian 4.19.90+ #1 SMP PREEMPT Wed Dec 18 20:39:10 CET 2019 armv7l GNU/Linux on a Raspberry Pi 3. For all my other Raspberry Pi's, I've attached a fan for PID CPU temperature control which is PWM modulated via a GPIO pin through a python script. It works flawlessly on my other Pi's.

First thing I notice is that python says

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ImportError: No module named RPi.GPIO

So I try

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pip install RPi.GPIO

Turns out that pip is not installed. So I go to https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/installing/ which says to run

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curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

Turns out that curl is not installed. So I run

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sudo apt install curl

and then

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sudo curl https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py -o get-pip.py

and then

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sudo pip install RPi.GPIO

which gives me LOTS of errors. Then I say to myself: If I can just turn on the fan, at least I can cool the CPU. But it turns out that even

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sudo echo 1 > /sys/class/gpio/gpio17/value

gives me "Access denied".

How does one control a fan under xbian?